Raphus cucullatus Skeleton or Dodo Bird Height is 27 inches & Dodo bird Skull measures 7 in. Both are museum quality polyurethane rein castings. Made in USA.
The Raphus cucullatus or Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) is an extinct flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Mauritius, which is east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
The Raphus cucullatus or Dodo closest genetic relative was the also-extinct Rodrigues solitaire. The two formed the subfamily Raphinae, a clade of extinct flightless birds that were a part of the family which includes pigeons and doves.
The Dodo was variously declared a small ostrich, a rail, an albatross, or a vulture, by early scientists.
In 1842, Danish zoologist Johannes Theodor Reinhardt proposed that dodos were ground pigeons, based on studies of a R. cucullatus or Dodo skull he had discovered in the collection of the Natural History Museum of Denmark.
After dissecting the preserved head and foot of the Raphus cucullatus or Dodo specimen at the Oxford University Museum and comparing it with the few remains then available of the extinct Rodrigues solitaire they concluded that the two were closely related.
Strickland stated that although not identical, these birds shared many distinguishing features of the leg bones, otherwise known only in pigeons.
Strickland and Melville established that the Dodo was anatomically similar to pigeons in many features. They pointed to the very short keratinous portion of the beak, with its long, slender, naked basal part. Other pigeons also have bare skin around their eyes, almost reaching their beak, as in dodos.
The Raphus cucullatus or Dodo forehead was high in relation to the beak, and the nostril was located low on the middle of the beak and surrounded by skin, a combination of features shared only with pigeons.
The legs of the Dodo were generally more similar to those of terrestrial pigeons than of other birds, both in their scales and in their skeletal features. Depictions of the large crop hinted at a relationship with pigeons, in which this feature is more developed than in other birds.
Pigeons generally have very small clutches, and the dodo is said to have laid a single egg. Like pigeons, the Dodo lacked the vomer and septum of the nostrils, and it shared details in the mandible, the zygomatic bone, the palate, and the hallux.
The Dodo differed from other pigeons mainly in the small size of the wings and the large size of the beak in proportion to the rest of the cranium.
For many years the Raphus cucullatus or Dodo and the Rodrigues solitaire were placed in a family of their own, the Raphidae (formerly Dididae), because their exact relationships with other pigeons were unresolved.
In 2002, American geneticist Beth Shapiro and colleagues analysed the DNA of the R. cucullatus or Dodo for the first time.
Comparison of mitochondrial cytochrome b and 12S rRNA sequences isolated from a tarsal of the Oxford specimen and a femur of a Rodrigues solitaire confirmed their close relationship and their placement within the Columbidae.
The genetic evidence was interpreted as showing the Southeast Asian Nicobar pigeon (Caloenas nicobarica) to be their closest living relative, followed by the crowned pigeons (Goura) of New Guinea, and the superficially Dodo-like tooth-billed pigeon (Didunculus strigirostris) from Samoa (its scientific name refers to its Dodo-like beak).
This clade consists of generally ground-dwelling island endemic pigeons. The following cladogram shows Raphus cucullatus or Dodo’s closest relationships within the Columbidae, based on Shapiro and colleagues.