Monday, January 23, 2012

a dodo, a penguin and a flamingo all fly into a ...... wait a minute.

Dodo birds. flightless chubby creatures.
I have an odd fascination with dodo birds, but i know as much about them as anyone with a  third grade education knows. Its extinct, it didn’t fly and well it was kinda dumb.
But really when did they become extinct, were they really dumb, and most importantly were they delicious?
Apparently there aren’t very good accounts of what it looked like, since most artists exaggerated colors and size. And there was no whole skeleton found until very recently. From there scientists concluded that the bird was at least 3 feet tall and weighed roughly at least 50 lbs. that’s huge and kinda scary.
The dodo had no natural enemies on the small island of Mauritius, they only feasted on a bunch of fruits and seeds and that’s what made them extra plump. There are a few accounts that call them greedy birds because they would eat a bunch of seeds and fruit probably to store up for the scarce month, sometimes they even ate rocks! There they lived super happy, and so when humans showed up with pigs and dogs they were curious and thus got eaten. There are accounts that they were so curious towards humans they would come right up to them even when they had clubs in their hands, only to be slaughtered.( Oh no, they were super nice. I would a kept it as a pet! ) Most accounts depict dodo meat as not tasty, except for the breast which was large and tender.  And I bet super moist and delicious. Damn greedy explorers.
Dodos were also responsible for germination of a tree called the tambalacocque, the seeds would only germinate if they passed through the dodos system, so yea the little dodo had to eat the seeds and then pooped ‘em out for the tree to grow, so no dodos, no tree, thankfully every once in a while it could grow without the help of the dodo, so the tree is still around today, the bird, not so much.
The dodo became extinct 175 years after first contact with humans. In 1598 L
So there you have it, overly friendly birds that are stout and chunky… I feel like the dodo bird version of people. Thank goodness I am not extinct..
need to know more : dodos

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