Scientists debunk long-held myth about the most famous animal extinction turning Darwins theory on its head

They weren’t the bird brain they were billed as.Once seen as synonymous with stupidity, the dodo bird was actually not as dumb as depicted — and could’ve been as smart as a modern pigeon.The flightless bird’s underrated intelligence was detailed in a study published in a zoological journal.“Our findings challenge the longstanding stereotype of the dodo as a clumsy, foolish daytime forager,” Professor Vera Weisbecker, from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, wrote in The Conversation.They set out to challenge the stigma surrounding the so-called buffoonish featherbag, which went extinct in the late 17th century, just decades after humans arrived on its home island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.This ground-hugging pigeon relative was reportedly wiped out by Dutch sailors — who they were completely unafraid of — via both hunting and predation by the dogs, cats, pigs and rats the interlopers brought with them.The allegedly dim-witted avian subsequently became shorthand for stupidity, with accounts describing how they’d hold the dodos captive so their distressed squawks would attract their brethren.Meanwhile, the expression “going the way of the dodo” means to go extinct, or become obsolete.However, the recent study shows that they didn’t deserve this evolutionary Darwin award.

To determine the extinct bird’s cognitive capacity, the team of international researchers conducted high-resolution CT scans of perfectly preserved dodo skulls, of which there are only three in the world.This allowed them to recreate the noggin’s shape, shedding light on the brain’s size and structure.They were also able to compare the dodo to different members of the pigeon family.The team found that the “dodo’s forebrain, linked to cognition and memory, was similar in proportion to other pigeons, when compared to the rest of the brain.”“In other words, there is no evidence the dodo was less intelligent than any other pigeon,” the researchers...