Scientists Find Dodo skeleton

[CalMeacham]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070629/sc_nm/mauritius_dodo_dc
There’s a partial skeleton in the American Museum of Natural History. i used to go see it every now and then. I’m curious which bones were missing in that case, and how this discovery fills in gaps.

This statement seems odd:

Hume said the dodo was almost certainly finished off by animals introduced by Europeans about 400 years ago. Theories that it was hunted to extinction by the Dutch were “total nonsense,” he said, adding that the remains were highly fragile.

Europeans were undoubtedly responsible for the dodo’s extinction. To drawn such a sure distinction (apparently) between the Dutch directly killing them off and their animals killing them off seems pedantic. The Dutch certainly did eat dodo, although they called them “Nauseating birds”, apparently because of the taste. And mariners who landed on the island would certainly prefer even not-great-tasting fresh meat, I think, to preserved salted meat. See Willy ley’s essay on the dodo in “The Dodo, tthe Lungfish, and the Unicorn”, or in “Willy Ley’s Exotic Zoology”.

[Sal_Ammoniac]

Seems like an okay distinction to me – the difference between intention and inadvertence. Of course, the end result is the same.

I thought I remembered that the Harvard Museum of Natural History had a dodo skeleton. There seems to be confirmation here.

[ralph124c]

Great! Now we can clone dods! is the DNA fresh enough?

[Harmonious_Discord]

@ralph124c

Great! Now we can clone dods! is the DNA fresh enough?

Fresh enough to get you slapped.