News Bite: Dodos and the evolution of bird brains

If you wander into the basement of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, and wander into the fossil collections, you will find a vast array of different dinosaurs dating back over 200 million years. However, just a few feet away from the oldest dinosaurs you will find several drawers filled with the bones of Raphus cucullatus: the dodo. These are not fossilized; the dodo has only been gone from the Earth for four hundred years, after all. Still, placing the dodo among all of the other extinct birds, alongside the dinosaurs seems perfectly appropriate to me.

Modern reconstruction of Raphus cucullatus by Yale ornithologist Michael Hanson. This painting incorporates new anatomical data about the shape of the body and the color of the feathers

As I mention in the episode, a dodo skeleton is not a common thing in museum collections. There are only a few skeletons that are nearly complete, most of which are preserved in European collections. Only one set of bones at the Oxford Museum of Natural History preserves the soft parts in a mummified state, and only of the head and the foot. As a matter of fact, we likely know less about the dodo than we do about some dinosaur species that have been extinct for more than sixty six million-years longer than the dodo. Moreover, scientists today are applying the same techniques and technologies used to understand the lives of fossil animals to answer questions about the life of the dodo.

The preserved skin of a dodo specimen at the Oxford Museum of Natural History.

Eugenia Gold is a scientist uniquely qualified to answer questions about this extinct species. She has engaged in a number of anatomical science projects, examining topics as varied as changes in shape during the life of crocodylians, the anatomy of the brain in the tyrannosaurid dinosaur Alioramus, and the evolution of bird brains! She’s got brains on the brain (I’m sure no one has e