Secret life of the dodo revealed
By Helen Briggs BBC News
24 August 2017
The dodo lived on the island of Mauritius until it died out about 350 years ago.
Scientists are piecing together clues about the life of the dodo, hundreds of years after the flightless bird was driven to extinction
Few scientific facts are known about the hapless bird, which was last sighted ∈1662. A study of bone specimens shows the chicks hatched ∈August and grew rapidly to adult size.
[1] The bird shed its feathers ∈March revealing fluffy grey plumage recorded ∈ historical accounts by
mariners.
Delphine Angst of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, was given access to some of the
dodo bones that still exist ∈ museums and collections, including specimens that were recently donated to a
[5] museum ∈France.
Her team analysed slices of bone from 22 dodos under the microscope to find out more about the
bird’s growth and breeding patterns.
“Before our study we knew very very little about these birds,” said Dr. Angst.
“Using the bone histology for the first time we managed to describe that this bird was actually
[10] breeding at a certain time of the year and was moulting just after that.”
The scientists can tell from growth patterns ∈ the bones that the chicks grew to adult size very
rapidly after hatching from eggs around August.
This would have given them a survival advantage when cyclones hit the island between November
and March, leading to a scarcity of food.
[15] However, the birds probably took several years to reach sexual maturity, possibly because the adult
birds lacked any natural predators.
The bones of adult birds also show signs of mineral loss, which suggests that they lost old damaged
feathers after the breeding season.
Ancient mariners gave conflicting accounts of the dodo, describing them as having “black down” or
[20] “curled plumes of a greyish colour”.
The research, published ∈Scientific Reports, backs this historical evidence.
“The dodo was quite a brown-grey bird, and during the moulting it had downy, black plumage,”
explained Dr. Angst.
“What we found using our scientific methods fit perfectly with what the sailors had written ∈ the
[25] past.”
Egg theft
The research could also shed light on the dodo’s extinction about 350 years ago, less than 100 years
after humans arrived on the island.
Hunting was a factor ∈ the dodo’s demise, but monkeys, deer, pigs and rats released on the island
from ships probably sealed their fate.
[30] Dodos laid their eggs ∈ nests on the ground, meaning they were vulnerable to attack by feral
mammals.
Dr. Angst said the dodo is considered “a very big icon of animal-human induced extinction”,
although the full facts are unknown. [...]
Disponível em: <http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41002562>. Acesso em: 27 ago. 2017. Adaptado.
No trecho “Using the bone histology for the first time we managed to describe that this bird was actually breeding at a certain time of the year and was moulting just after that.” (Linhas 9-10), podemos identificar verbos que foram empregados no:
