"There were bones of the dodo that were just unknown to science until now." "We discovered that the anatomy of the dodo we were looking at was not previously described in detail," Claessens said. In addition, they scanned a second dodo skeleton Thirioux also created, a composite of two or more skeletons that was housed at the Durban Museum of Natural Science in South Africa. The scientists used a laser scanner to create a 3D digital model of the specimen. "This meant that nobody tried to make a collection of the bird or study it in detail." "The dodo's extinction happened at a time when people didn't understand the concept of extinction - science as we know it was still in its infancy,"lead study author Leon Claessens, a vertebrate paleontologist at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, told Live Science. Surprisingly, despite the dodo's fame, and the fact the bird was alive during recorded human history, little is known about the anatomy and biology of this animal. "The skull of the dodo is so large and its beak so robust that it is easy to understand that the earliest naturalists thought it was related to vultures and other birds of prey, rather than the pigeon family," said study co-author Hanneke Meijer at the Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Spain. The giant bird was actually a type of pigeon. It went extinct by 1693, less than a century after the Dutch discovered the island in 1598, killed off by creatures such as rats and pigs, which sailors introduced to Mauritius either accidentally or intentionally. The dodo was a flightless bird about 3 feet (1 meter) tall that was native to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. New laser scans of the dodo, perhaps the most famous animal to have gone extinct in human history, have unexpectedly exposed portions of its anatomy unknown to science, which are revealing secrets about how the bird once lived.
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