The dodo wasn't stupid: skull scans reveal a keen sense of smell and dusk activity

CT scans of the world's only two complete dodo skulls — one in Copenhagen, one in Oxford — reveal a bird with an enhanced sense of smell, a highly sensitive beak and a lifestyle that may have extended into dawn and dusk. Far from being dim-witted, the extinct icon had sensory abilities on par with its living relatives.

Key Takeaways

CT scans of the world's only two complete dodo skulls — one in Copenhagen, one in Oxford — reveal a bird with an enhanced sense of smell, a highly sensitive beak and a lifestyle that may have extended into dawn and dusk.
Far from being dim-witted, the extinct icon had sensory abilities on par with its living relatives.

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The dodo has spent centuries as the world's most famous symbol of stupidity — a clumsy, doomed bird whose name is shorthand for foolishness. New research suggests that reputation is undeserved.

An international team led by the University of Lethbridge in Canada digitally reconstructed the brains of three dodo skulls — including the world's only two complete specimens, one at the Natural History Museum Denmark in Copenhagen and one at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History — and compared them with 36 species of living pigeons and doves, the dodo's closest relatives.

Because a brain leaves an imprint on the bone around it, high-resolution CT scans let the researchers reconstruct the space the dodo's brain once occupied. The results, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, reveal a bird with a distinctive suite of sensory adaptations: a surprisingly large olfactory region, suggesting an enhanced sense of smell; a highly sensitive upper beak capable of gathering tactile information; and brain anatomy hinting that the dodo may have been active at dawn and dusk, not just during daylight.

Crucially, the team found no evidence that the dodo had diminished cognitive abilities compared with its living relatives. 'The dodo has become a symbol of extinction, but in many ways it remains surprisingly mysterious,' said Peter Hosner of the Natural History Museum Denmark, a co-author of the study. 'Every new piece of evidence helps us move beyond myths.'

The dodo, a flightless bird roughly the size of a turkey, evolved in isolation on Mauritius and was driven to extinction by the late 17th century, barely a century after humans arrived on the island.