Angelinna Faisca 5/12/21
Anthes, Emily. “The Smart, Agile, and Completely Underrated Dodo Bird.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 8 June 2016, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/the-dodos-redemption/486086/
The article that I reviewed was “The Smart, Agile, and Completely Dodo Bird.” This article first starts off with the stereotypical ideas and thoughts of the dodo bird: Clumsy, naive, fat, walking straight into the arms of hungry Dutch settlers. However, this story has been told like that over and over, even hearing it in my younger years in school. However, most recently scientists have learned that this wasn’t the case at all. Emily Anthes, the author of this article, then goes into the origin of the dodo bird. About 8 million years ago, the ancestors of the dodo bird, which is part of the Pigeon family, arrived on a small volcanic island and lost its flight and took a big, flightless bird image, one we are familiar with seeing as we speak of the dodo bird. The first record of the dodo bird was in 1599. After this, in less than a hundred years, the dodo bird died out. To make things especially harder, taxidermies were not something that was done efficiently, so many dodo specimens were not saved, bringing the myths even closer to utter false facts. Going far into the future from 1599, in 1865, a fossil deposit was found, and in the 20th century, only one full skeleton was made. In 2011, a paleontologist named Leon Claessens travelled to the island to thoroughly look through the skeleton, along with two of his students. After printing a 3-D model of each bone, they were able to find that the bones of the dodo bird were made to run through dense forests and rocky hills. After all of this research, they saw that the dodo bird was not a total useless oddity, as they had found that they had also used their small wings for balance. What was also found was that dodo birds had enlarged olfactory bulbs, which might have enhanced their sense of smell, helping them with finding food sources. Overall, this article goes through the different factors of the myths that were surrounding the dodo bird, when all in all, it was probably one of the most useful and evolved birds in its time.
In connection to our current life, there were so many things that none of us knew about this bird, especially amongst the myths that we have been told. Which leads to the question, what else can we learn about extinct animals? The answer is quite a lot, as the dodo bird has been extinct for over 300 years, yet we are still able to even comprehend what its brain size was and even knowing what its sense of smell was. This leads scientists to wonder and explore what other things they can figure out about other extinct animals and how they could have been beneficial to our current Earth.
Finally, although I don’t think the article really needed anything, since it was a really good article in my opinion, I think it could have included images, as it didn’t include any throughout the article, which just made it seem wordy, and less engaging to some degree. However I thought it was a very good article, as it spoke of all the functions that were questioned about. Overall, Emily Anthes article was very informative and gave me a lot of information about the myths of the dodo and what the dodo bird was really all about.
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