The dodo’s reputation has taken another hit. CT scans of two of the rarest skulls on Earth suggest the extinct bird may have had a stronger sense of smell, a highly sensitive beak, and a daily routine that stretched into dawn and dusk.
The findings come from an international study that used the only two complete dodo skulls known to exist, one at the Natural History Museum Denmark and the other at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Researchers also drew on CT data from a third dodo skull.
Using high-resolution CT scans, scientists built detailed three-dimensional digital models of the skulls, including the cavity where the brain once sat. Those spaces can preserve impressions left by the developing brain, giving researchers evidence about how an extinct animal processed information from its surroundings.
“The dodo is one of the world’s most recognizable extinct animals, yet surprisingly little is known about how it actually lived,” said Peter Andrew Hosner, Associate Professor and Curator of Birds at the Natural History Museum Denmark and co-author of the study published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
“Its behavior and foraging ecology have been debated for centuries. Having access to one of only two complete dodo skulls has given us a unique opportunity to compare the dodo with its closest living relatives and gain new insights into how it experienced and interacted with its environment,” he said.
The Copenhagen skull has been in the museum’s collections for centuries. Preparations for a new museum building and permanent galleries due to open in 2027 gave researchers a chance to study it in greater detail without damaging it.
Researchers compared the reconstructed dodo brain cavities with those of living pigeons and doves, the dodo’s closest living relatives. They found the extinct bird’s sensory profile differed in several ways.
The skull anatomy suggests the dodo may not have been active only during the day and could also have moved or foraged around dawn and dusk. It may also have relied more heavily on smell than modern pigeons and doves. Its large upper beak also appears to have been well suited to collecting tactile information from its surroundings.
“Studying extinct animals is a bit like detective work. Although the dodo’s brain disappeared centuries ago, it left an imprint on the inside of the skull. By digitally reconstructing those spaces and comparing them with the brains of living birds, we can begin to piece together how the dodo sensed, behaved, and interacted with the world around it,” said Christy Anna Hipsley, Associate Professor at the Natural History Museum Denmark and co-author of the study.
Scientists said anatomy alone cannot determine exact behaviour, but the findings offer new clues about how the bird may have located food and interacted with its habitat on Mauritius before it became extinct in the late 17th century.
Popular culture has often portrayed the dodo as clumsy and unintelligent. The researchers said the new findings do not support the idea that it had reduced cognitive abilities compared with living pigeons and doves.
Instead, they point to an animal with a distinctive set of sensory adaptations that developed over millions of years on an isolated island.
“The dodo’s skull is unlike that of any living bird, which makes it both fascinating and difficult to interpret. By comparing digital reconstructions of the world’s only two complete dodo skulls, we now have a much stronger foundation for identifying which features are truly characteristic of the species and what they can tell us about how the dodo lived,” Hipsley said.
The study, “The sensory world of the Dodo and Solitaire revealed by endocast and skull anatomy,” was published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
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