Or it did, at least longer than anyone thought.
LONDON (Reuters) - Dodos, the flightless birds renowned for being dead, didn't die out completely until about 1690 -- some 30 years later than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday.
The last confirmed sighting of the lumbering, dim-witted bird that weighed about 51 pounds was on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean in 1662, less than 80 years after it was first sighted.
But new calculations by scientists in Britain and the United States suggest they existed for another three decades.
"Our estimate is about 30 years," Andrew Solow, an ecological and environmental statistician at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said in an interview.
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/treasure_fossil/Treasures/Dodo/dodo2.gif
That "lumbering, dim-witted" bit seems a bit harsh there.
― Gear! (Gear!), Thursday, 20 November 2003 00:45 (twenty-two years ago)