2-991-103 - Heritage Imagined/Heritage Images

AI IMAGE - Dodo in a glass case in a museum, 2023. The first recorded mention of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus), an extinct flightless bird living on the island of Mauritius, was by Dutch sailors in 1598. The last widely accepted sighting of a dodo was in 1662, after it had been hunted to extinction. The fact that this had happened within less than a century of its discovery called attention to the previously unrecognised problem of human involvement in the disappearance of entire species.