The dodo, an extinct flightless bird that up until a few centuries ago lived in Mauritius, continues to fascinate. Archaeologists and palaeontologists are still trying to find out how this enormously fat 'dove' lived, and how it died. The latest in a series of annual expeditions to Mauritius – in the Indian Ocean - by the Dutch Museum of Natural History in Leiden, or Naturalis, has made some important new discoveries.

 
The team discovered dodo bones in Mauritius that are so perfectly preserved it might just be possible to extract DNA from them. If so, then scientists will finally have the complete genome of the extinct bird. They will be able to discover how the dodo evolved from the ancient ancestors of today’s doves and perhaps even breed a new dodo-like bird. However, the latter possibility is a highly speculative one.

According to expedition leader Kenneth Rijsdijk, this year's trip to Mauritius has resulted in a wealth of new information. There is a huge mass grave containing thousands of dodo remains in Mare aux Songes, the marshy area where the annual dig is conducted. What is left of the dodo's entire environment, complete with animals, plants and insects, remains intact. And a new way of excavating has improved results:

 
"Previously, we used a digging machine and just blindly dug up the marsh. When you do it like that, you don't see the position of the bones and that's really important for this sort of forensic investigation. If you want to know how an animal has died, then you also have to see how the bones are placed in relation to each other and anything else. And that was what we were able to do for the first time this year."

Egyptian pharaohs
The Mare aux Songes mass grave is not the location where the last dodos lived before the bird became extinct. It's actually about 4000 years old and the dodos found there probably died as a result of the global drought which also heralded the downfall of the Egyptian pharaohs' empire.

The dodo managed to survive that disaster and its population grew until Dutch VOC (Dutch East India Company) ships landed in Mauritius. Around 1640 an unknown settler ate the last dodo egg and, by 1690, the bird was extinct.

Disgusting bird
Dr Rijsdijk, however, does not believe the story that Dutch sailors were responsible for the demise of the dodo. VOC archives and ships' records describe the dodo as a 'disgusting bird'. It was, it seems, inedible. Besides, at just a few dozen, there were just too few Dutch settlers on the island to eat the whole dodo population.

Non-native animals, which the settlers brought with them, were probably responsible. Pigs, rats and cats made short work of eggs which, until then, had lain totally safe in unprotected nests on the ground.

The return of the dodo thanks to the possible discovery of its complete DNA is by no means certain, but Dr Rijsdijk is excited about the quest:

"The presence of DNA in bones depends on age and temperature. The bones we've found are right on the cusp; it's not certain whether there’ll be any DNA left, but there could well be. We're working with Penn State University in the United States, and they have a lab where they endeavour to identify ancient DNA. It's really a kind of Holy Grail: will we manage to recover dodo DNA? And, if we get the dodo's genome…?"

Lookalike
Dr Rijsdijk is not ready to claim that the dodo could really be brought back to life, but he isn't entirely dismissing the notion of a 'Jurassic-Park' dodo either. At the moment, however, it remains mere science fiction. What would definitely be possible is to use the genome as a kind of map for a breeding programme. A dodo-lookalike would then be a definite possibility, but as to whether that would be morally or scientifically desirable…