A planetary star
Traveling with Dodo Airlines? This is now possible. It is one of the curiosities ofAnimal Crossing: New Horizons from Nintendo. Released in the spring of 2020, the new episode of this life simulation game, populated by anthropomorphic animals, was an immediate success. Living on an island, the player can visit friends on other islands or use the postal service, services offered by Dodo Airlines, an ironic reference to the bird that did not fly.
An endemic species of Mauritius
Discovered by the Portuguese at the beginning of the 16th century, Mauritius was only colonized in 1598 by the Dutch. The origin of its name is therefore uncertain. Historical descriptions of the animal by navigators present it, in general, in an unfavorable light. In their eyes, he is clumsy and looks like a kind of big turkey. In this period of great discoveries when food is often lacking, even its flesh, too firm, disgusts them a little. Less than a century later, the dodo is extinct, easily hunted by the first settlers because it cannot fly. But most of all, he fell victim to the new predators they brought to the island: dogs, pigs or rats. However, his memory is rooted in Europe where living specimens have been exhibited and where some of them have been immortalized.
A distorted view in Europe
One of the rare representations of the bird, performed in the late 1620s by the Flemish Roelandt Savery, Edwards’Dodo (below), will impose for a long time the image of a plump poultry. A roundness that is explained today by the life in captivity of an animal, which is much more athletic when it evolves in its natural environment.
A hero in wonderland
The creature became a great figure in the Western imagination in 1865, in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland : he is the organizer of a surrealist race in which the participants are all winners. English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, is said to have made a duplicate of himself since he stammered and used to repeat the first syllable of his name. A professor at Christ Church College, Oxford, he may have heard of this odd alter ego at the prestigious university’s Natural History Museum. His tale, illustrated by John Tenniel, popularizes the vision of a plump and strange sleep.
An object of study at Oxford
The natural history museum at the University of Oxford has a head and a paw of Raphus cucullatus, its scientific name, also called dodo. DNA analyzes have been carried out on fragments of these limbs which have retained soft tissues, the only ones that exist in the world. The results showed that the closest living relative, now classified in the order of Columbiforms, is the Nicobar pigeon, a species from the eastern Indian Ocean.
Restore the truth
In 2016, an international team of researchers did justice to the dodo, by presenting 3D reconstructions of its silhouette made from the skeleton kept at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Durban (South Africa) and that of the Mauritius Institute. , the only suit in the world. Powerful legs, stabilizing wings, a massive skull, these are the first reliable images of the species wiped out by man and the object of many fantasies.
Article published in the issue Femme Actuelle Jeux Voyages n ° 44 December-January 2021
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