Night of the Living Dodo!

Sometime in 2007 I was reading a book all about... Dodos! And it had lotsa pictures. Dodos went extinct in the 1500s, so there's no photos of them, but people did think to draw a few pictures.

And then you know what I did? I drew pictures of the pictures they drew. Brilliant, huh? Many of them aren't that great, however, the head in the upper right was drawn by a naturalist or some such who had a dead bird in his lap before it was butchered and eaten, so he had a very good model (as opposed to after being butchered and eaten).

secondhand dodo sketches

Also, the lower right hand one is copied off of this painting by Cornelius Saftleven, which you can compare with here:

I call that dodo 'Flaky'!

Of course, bones have also been found, so I lightly sketched the articulated skeleton of a dodo, then drew some flesh on it.

dodo reconstruction

Many years ago, I used to read all about dodos (Raphus cucullatus) which were large, flightless and supposedly fat (at least part of the year). Dull in color, they had greenish bill sheaths which were apparently shed each year (like 'Flaky', above).
` People who messed around on Mauritius didn't like to eat them, which must have been why they kept pigs, who did. Supposedly, pigs eating the dodo's eggs was what really finished them off.
` Dodos were also of the same family (Raphidae) as similar birds that were boring brown instead of boring gray, called solitaires (unsurprisingly also extinct) who lived on the nearby islands of Rodrigues and Reunion.
` The males had large clubs on the ends of their wings, for fighting and for rattling against their sides as a display. They also had petite-looking bills, looking more like the smaller relatives of dodos and solitaires; pigeons (which are the same kind of bird as doves).
` To be precise, dodos and solitaires are of the same order of birds as pigeons (Columbiformes), though pigeons are a different family (Columbidae). That's about all I remember at this point.

Anyway, I highly suggest that you see what's going on in my other blogs - Lucas has his own TV show, plus I have a year's worth of photos up on Flickr, and I'm organizing my Corrigendopedia website. There is something wrong with you if you don't.