The permanence of the exhibits sits in stark contrast to the rapidly shifting landscape of the “real” (or outside) world. Indeed, what’s on display is “Natural History,” as opposed to the “Natural Present” or “Natural Future.” The museum portrays an idea of nature that is fixed within an isolated microcosm in which time has been distorted, then paused. This gives me a comforting sense of familiarity, but a bitter aftertaste lingers, and the museum’s immutable nature leaves me perturbed. It is a portal through which I can revisit my childhood.ĭespite a significant revamp in the mid-2000s, the museum has remained largely unchanged throughout my lifetime as a visitor. As well as plunging into vast global histories, this particular museum enables me to turn back through autobiographical time. In this way, the building is a time machine, a facilitator of uncanny encounters. The long-extinct creatures are particularly compelling because-unlike the animals that are still with us-the museum is the only place they can be seen. It is the world under one roof, housing an array of different collections spanning centuries and species of all shapes and sizes. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, published online Februdoi: 10.1111/zoj.The doors of the National Museum of Scotland granted me entry into a lifelong fascination with Natural History. The first endocast of the extinct dodo ( Raphus cucullatus) and an anatomical comparison amongst close relatives (Aves, Columbiformes). “Because dodos and Rodrigues solitaires were ground-dwellers, they relied on smell to find food, which might have included fruit, small land vertebrates, and marine animals like shellfish,” the scientists said. In general, birds depend much more on sight rather than smell to navigate through their world, and as a result, they tend to have larger optic lobes than olfactory bulbs. “Enlarged olfactory bulbs are a shared characteristic of the Raphinae and posteriorly angled semicircular canals are particular to the dodo compared with the other eight species sampled here,” Gold and co-authors said. They also discovered an unusual curvature of the dodo’s semicircular canal - the balance organs located in the ear. American Museum of Natural History.īoth the dodo and the Rodrigues solitaire had large and differentiated olfactory bulbs, according to the scientists. Image credit: Maria Eugenia Leone Gold et al. Side views of brain endocasts from the dodo (left), the Rodrigues solitaire (center), and the Nicobar pigeon (right): enlarged olfactory bulbs, labeled ob, can be seen in the dodo and the solitaire. “Of course, there’s more to intelligence than just overall brain size, but this gives us a basic measure,” Gold said. “So if you take brain size as a proxy for intelligence, dodos probably had a similar intelligence level to pigeons.” “It’s not impressively large or impressively small – it’s exactly the size you would predict it to be for its body size,” said study lead author Maria Eugenia Leone Gold, a researcher at Stony Brook University and the American Museum of Natural History. When comparing the size of the birds’ brains to their body sizes, they found that the dodo was ‘right on the line.’ Out of these scans, the scientists built virtual brain endocasts to determine the overall brain size as well as the size of various structures. They also CT-scanned the skulls of eight close relatives - ranging from the extinct bird Rodrigues solitaire ( Pezophaps solitaria) to the common pigeon ( Columba livia). To examine the brain of the dodo, a team of researchers from Denmark and the United States imaged a well-preserved skull of the bird with high-resolution computed tomography (CT) scanning. The bird was about 1 m tall, weighed 10-23 kg, and had blue-gray plumage, a big head, a long bill, small useless wings, stout yellow legs, and a tuft of curly feathers high on its rear end.Įven though the dodo has become an example of stupidity, oddity, obsolescence, and extinction, most aspects of its biology are still unknown. It was discovered by European sailors in 1598, and was extinct by 1680. The dodo is an extinct flightless bird that lived on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. The dodo ( Raphus cucullatus) by Frederick William Frohawk, 1905.
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