Contenders for this dubious distinction are the black rhino, Sumatran elephant, pangolin, leatherback turtle, and mountain gorilla. With that in mind, the exhibition We Are Nature: Living in the Anthropocene is asking visitors to vote for the creature most likely not to succeed. Although we humans now understand the consequences of our actions, that knowledge is not always enough to quell our baser instincts. It was a concept no one considered.īut times have changed, right? Well, yes and no. In fact, it took less than 100 years for the dodo to become a no go.īack then, the idea of wiping out an entire species forever was inconceivable in the truest sense of the word. No longer ruling the roost, the dodo’s days were numbered. From the dodo’s perspective, that just meant more mouths to feed.

Where ships are docked, inevitably rats and cats disembark. They soon realized how comically easy it was to walk up to an unsuspecting bird and club it over the head. The settlers, however, were not quite as amicable. With no natural predators to fear, the feathered creatures greeted the new arrivals as friends.

As the story goes, the demise of this flightless, clueless, graceless big galoot of a bird was no surprise (except, one imagines, to the dodos themselves).Ī descendant of the pigeon, dodos were living the good life on the island of Mauritius (located east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean), but that all changed when Dutch settlers began arriving in the late 1590s. History-not to mention humanity-has not been kind to the dodo bird.

Living dodo bird