'In the struggle to survive,
evolution has produced millions of creatures,
yet 99.9 per cent of them are extinct.'
'What killed off the seemingly impregnable mammoth?'
'Why did lethal predators like the sabre-tooth perish?'
'What destroyed the giant Irish elk?'
'This series investigates six remarkable animals
and the causes of their extinction.'
'Was nature or man to blame?'
'Were they unfit or just unlucky?'
'Is the history of life on earth really the history of death?'
'In September 1598,
the crew of the Dutch East Indiaman the Amsterdam were saved from death.'
Come on!
'Hit by a savage storm off the Cape of Good Hope,
they were blown into the unchartered waters of the Indian Ocean.'
'By chance, currents carried them within sight of a tropical island.'
'The men were half-starved, and the island promised food.'
'The sailors weren't the only two-legged creatures to have discovered this paradise.'
'The Dutch encountered an extraordinary creature.'
'They called it dodaarsen — the fat arse.'
'Within 80 years it would be gone forever.'
'We knew less about it than we did about the dinosaurs —
until now.'
'Sugar plantations have replaced the jungles the Dutch explored.'
'Tourists relax where the dodo once lived.'
'But palaeontologist Julian Hume is no tourist.'
'He's here to discover what the dodo was like, and what happened to it.'
'The problem is, despite its fame, there is scant evidence.'
'Only a few rough sketches of living dodos were made.'
'They were copied — often badly — and incorporated into fanciful paintings,
creating the enduring myth of a hapless bird.'
In Dutch art, the dodo is portrayed as a fat, clumsy, absurd species,
the butt of jokes.
It was often in fantasy landscapes, such as Orpheus taming animals with his lute.
It became a mythical species on par with the griffin and phoenix,
and that's partly why it became an icon of extinction.
'The dodo seemed so bizarre and comical
that by the 18thC some scientists doubted it had ever existed.'
'When Lewis Carroll caricatured the dodo in Alice In Wonderland,
the bird ended up more surreal than real.'
'Around the same time, evidence was unearthed that proved it had existed'
'Dug up in 1865, these are the only complete dodo skeletons in the world'
'With them, Julian can separate fact from fiction
and reconstruct what the dodo was really like.'
'With the skeleton, we can tell more about the bird and how it looked.'
Long, sinuous neck, upright stance, about two and a half feet tall.
It's a different picture from the early drawings.
'In popular imagination, the dodo is an inept, harmless creature,
but the skull tells a different story.'
The most incredible thing is the dodo's large head and bill.
The horny tip would be regrown each year for feeding and fighting.
That would've made this bird very fierce indeed.
Above all, the skeleton reveals that this bird was flightless.
Small, withered wings, roughly the size of a chicken's,
and to support this bulk, it needed sturdy legs.
'One myth dies hard —
the Dutch nickname dodaarsen, "fat arse", seems to have been justified.'
Because dodos were flightless,
they wouldn't have breast muscles to power flight.
The chest would be quite narrow,
the weight would hang underneath, concentrated on the bottom.
'But the skeletons tell us nothing about how it lived, what it ate, and why ultimately it died out.'
'Pockets of native trees are rare amongst the sugar cane,
but for Julian they're the kind of habitat that might've sustained the dodo.'
'Tall and slender trees leave the forest floor open for feeding.'
This dry forest was where the dodo fought, fed and bred.
Dominated by these wonderful trees, such as ebony,
and also by a unique palm flora,
these species produced huge amounts of fruit throughout the year,
and the floor would've been covered with them.
species such as hurricane palm, screw pines,...
bottle palms,...
and, of course, ebony.
This was almost certainly the mainstay of the dodo's diet, and it would've swallowed them whole
LOW COOING
SQUAWKING
'The dodos are constantly on the lookout for fallen fruit,
pouncing on it before competitors arrive.'
PEEPING
'But the dodo may have hunted for other tasty morsels.'
Mauritius is a volcanic island and has acidic soil.
These soils can lack essential elements such as calcium.
In the breeding season, dodos would need extra calcium for eggshells,
and to supplement their diet, I think they needed more than fruit.
'Snail shells would've provided a calcium source in the ebony forest.'
'The evidence is helping to overturn the view of the clumsy dodo.'
'But this is only the start.'
'Until this year, no-one was even sure what kind of bird it was.'
'Could it perhaps be a type of ostrich or vulture?
'The remarkable journey of one dodo is the key to this mystery.'
SQUAWKS
'Back in the 17th century,
reports of the dodo captured the imagination of Europeans.'
'Dodomania meant live specimens would fetch high prices,
and the Dutch tried to ship them back to Europe.'
SQUAWKS
'One made it to London, where it was kept as a popular attraction,
visited by the diarist Sir Hamon L'Estrange.'
"It was kept in a chamber, and was a great fowl, bigger than the largest turkey cock,
but stouter and thicker, of more erect shape."
"The keeper called it a dodo."
'When it died, this dodo was stuffed and brought to Oxford.'
'Unfortunately, in 1755 a spring-cleaning curator threw most of the moth-eaten specimen away.'
'By chance, the shrivelled head and one leg were saved.'
'Today this is the only dodo skin tissue left it the world.'
'Its lucky survival offers an amazing opportunity.'
'Scientists can at last identify what type of bird the dodo actually was.'
WHIRRING
'Dr Beth Schapiro is extracting DNA
from the lower leg of the Oxford bird.'
'It's exciting to be able to use DNA techniques to solve a question
that's plagued naturalists since the dodo was discovered.'
'With the DNA that I extracted from a leg, I was able to confirm that the dodo is a pigeon.'
Not a separate group, it belongs in the middle of the pigeons.
'But that isn't the only surprise.'
'To discover where the dodo was from,
Beth then compared the DNA to a range of modern African pigeons,
because the Africa is the nearest continental landmass to Mauritius.'
We were surprised that it did not come out closely related to the pigeons from Africa,
but it was most closely related to a pigeon from Southeast Asia.
'The dodo's ancestor must have travelled 4,000 miles across the Indian Ocean to get to Mauritius.'
It's likely that the common ancestor of the dodo was from this area.
The majority of the pigeons in this group have ranges in this area.
That ancestor probably made his way
up here, down the coast of India,
through this range of sea stacks and volcanic islands
all the way down here to Mauritius.
'When the dodo's ancestor reached Mauritius, as much as ten million years ago, it found pigeon paradise.'
COOING & SQUAWKING
'It had no predators, and no longer needing to fly,
it evolved into a large, ground-dwelling bird.'
SQUAWKS
'Knowing it was a pigpen gives Julian Hume a clearer picture
of how the dodo might have behaved.'
During breeding, they would've been very aggressive towards each other.
We believe they had territories,
which the males defended to attract mates and have food for the young.
'Like other pigeons, males gather nesting materials in their territory'
'They'll defend it noisily from all comers.'
When two superior males fought, possibly over the best territory,
it would have been an amazing sight.
Bill tapping, squawking,
and eventually that bill tip would've been used as a weapon.
'Males could do a lot of damage,
but this time the newcomer relents.'
'A female is attracted by the commotion.'
SQUAWKS
'Pigeons have a ritualised display, and the dodo would've had it on a grand scale.'
The male would've puffed its chest, and given its resonant call.
(DEEP) Dooo-Dooo. Dooo-Dooo.
SQUAWKS
COOS
'This male is trying to mesmerise his intended female.'
'The female casts an eye over his nesting material.'
'She'll build a nest in which she'll lay a single egg.'
COOING
'The image of the hapless dodo
has been turned on its head by recent discoveries.'
'And yet the dodo would soon meet its end.'
'For the first time in ten million years,
it had to contend with a lethal predator.'
COOS SOFTLY
'But what happened next is controversial.'
'Did the Dutch really wipe out the dodo?'
'In 1662, 64 years after the Dutch discovery of the island,
a German called Volquard Iversen was shipwrecked on Mauritius.'
'He walked the length and breadth of the island, but saw no dodos.'
'Hungry and weary,
he wandered across to a small islet cut off at high tide.'
Argh!
'This was the last dodo colony that humans aver saw.'
'By the 1670s, within 80 years of its discovery,
the dodo had undergone a devastating extinction.'
'But why?'
'The traditional explanation, based on misleading early artwork,
was that the dodo was simply inept, fat and easy to kill —
an inadequate species.'
'The Dutch only sent it to its inevitable doom.'
'The latest scientific evidence reveals the dodo in a new light.'
'Not the clumsy bird of legend,
it was a pigeon that had evolved over some ten million years
into a powerful ground-dwelling creature.'
'So what was the Dutch invaders' real relationship with the dodo?'
'Did they hunt it to extinction?'
'New archaeological evidence is throwing up more surprises.'
'In 1638, the Dutch established a colony on Mauritius
as a staging post on the spice route to the Far East.'
'They called their compound Fort Hendrik.'
'Around 100 colonists logged ebony
and maintained the small harbour regularly battered by cyclones.'
You can compare it to a spaceship arriving from another planet,
on a completely unknown planet, and bringing everything with them.
'Dutch archaeologist Pieter Floore is excavating a rubbish dump under the old kitchens
to find out how the colonists fed themselves.'
'I was expecting to find thousands of dodo bones.'
Er, maybe a little bit naive,
but on the other hand, because we didn't find any dodo bones over here
and still after four years of excavation
we haven't found any dodo bones over here,
you have to find an explanation for that.
'Could written accounts provide answers?'
'Ships' logs tell us that the crew of the Amsterdam killed a clutch of dodos
in the two days following their discovery of Mauritius.'
'The sailors were half-starved after three weeks drifting across the Indian Ocean,
but even so, the dodo didn't go down at all well.'
"It was so tough we could not cook it properly but ate it half-done."
"Through its oiliness, it cannot choose but quickly cloy and nauseate the stomach."
'Examining the skeleton,
palaeontologist Julian Hume sees why roast dodo would have been an unpalatable dish.'
The classic bird part that you eat is the breast,
but the dodo had none, so the meat and fat would've gone onto the rump,
and this would have made it oily because there was no actual muscle.
The legs would have been muscular,
but as the birds aged they probably became sinuous
so you can see why these early Dutch sailors did not like to eat them.
'Not only did the dodo make a poor meal, it could be awkward prey.'
'Ships' logs describe tussles between sailors and aggressive dodos'
'They stress the bird could defend itself.'
"They are superb and proud, very jaunty and audacious of gait."
"Their war weapon was the mouth with which they could bite very fiercely"
'The case against the Dutch as perpetrators of extinction is suspect.'
'If the Dutch didn't prize dodo as food, what else could explain its disappearance?'
'There's a vital clue in the account of the shipwrecked Volquard Iversen.'
'When he stumbled across the last dodos,
it was on an islet to the east of the main island.'
'It could only be reached at low tide by wading through the shallows.'
'Someone or something had driven the dodo off the mainland to this islet.'
'Evidence emerging back at Fort Hendrik suggests what that may be.'
'Pieter Floore may not be finding dodo remains,
but he is frequently digging up other, non-native animal bones.'
We find tens of thousands of bones of non-indigenous species.
The Dutch introduced all kinds of animals and plants they thought were useful for new ships coming in,
like goats, like pigs.
You can imagine it must have brought some harm to the island,
the introduction of all these strange animals.
'Some broke loose, raised their young in the wild.'
'The forests were being invaded by these animal escapees.'
'The dodo had to cope with new competitors,
and in one important way it was peculiarly vulnerable.'
COOS
'Being flightless, the dodo raised its young on the ground.'
'Julian believes it was a victim of its own evolutionary success.'
'Dodos evolved in isolation for millions of years, never needed to get off the floor.'
They could have taken time to rear their young, maybe one every second year.
There was no need to reproduce in larger numbers.
'Then, sadly, pigs arrived.'
'Mauritius was more than a pigeon paradise —
its rich undergrowth also made it a pig paradise.'
'Of all the animals introduced,
the impact of ground—rooting pigs on ground-nesting birds would have been devastating.'
'Not only would the pig have competed for food,
it may have disrupted age-old mating and laying behaviour.'
SQUAWKS
'Here at last is a powerful explanation for the catastrophic disappearance of the dodo.'
'Pigs would have ravaged the species on the mainland.'
'Unable to rear young on the ground,
the ageing dodo population was driven to the coast,
and confined to islets such as the one Volquard Iversen stumbled upon in 1662.'
'Isolated and ageing, the last dodos faced oblivion.'
SQUAWKS PLAINTIVELY
The dodo has an aura about it, the extinct species of the world.
The term dead as a dodo is used in reference to it.
'In fact, this bird was a superior species, perfectly adapted to its environment.'
The sheer numbers and aggressiveness of introduced species were too much for it.
'The story of the dodo's annihilation
reveals how quickly extinction can overtake a species.'
'And 400 years after it was first discovered,
we at last know the dodo's extinction
was simply a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.'
Intelfax Subtitles KATHERINE STOTT