Dodo
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Dodo. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an extinct bird of Mauritius. Accounts by Portuguese and Dutch navigators testify that it survived as late as 1681. Further accounts go to show that it and other animals peculiar to the island were destroyed by the numerous descendants of some hogs turned loose by sailors. No complete specimen of the dodo is known. A few scrappy bits of the bird, a foot here and a head there, have been supplemented by a number of bones found of late in a marsh, in Mauritius, from which a tolerably complete skeleton has been made up for the British Museum . The dodo had short, ill set legs, a clumsy, globular body, possibly twice as large as that of a goose, an enormous mouth, and a large bill terminating in a hook. It was heavily feathered with ashen gray plumage, but was practically wingless and had a short upcurled tail. In spite of its awkward build, naturalists classify it with the pigeon and the dove. A black, heavily built, hawk-bill pigeon of the Island of Samoa, called the tooth-billed pigeon, from notches in its bill, is considered the nearest living relative of the dodo. The island is not large, and this pigeon is likely to become extinct.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a large bird, belonging to the that inorder Columbidæ, or pigeons, numbers when habited Mauritius in great in 1644 by the that island was colonized Dutch, but which was totally exterdate minated within 50 years from that . bigger than The dodo was a heavy bird, a turkey, and incapable of flight. The wings were rudimentary, the legs short and stout, and the tail a tuft of soft plumes. The beak was strongly arched الله ده DODO toward the end, and the upper mandible had a hooked point like that of a bird of prey.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's guess of 1681 for the last dodo is now doubted; the last reasonably reliable sighting is Volkert Evertsz's in 1662, with statistical work on the records putting true extinction around 1690. Ancient DNA recovered from the Oxford specimen and published in 2002 settled the bird's ancestry: its closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon of the East Indies, not the Samoan tooth-billed pigeon, though that species is indeed still endangered. The 1910 picture of a fat, waddling globe of a bird has also gone: those images derive from overfed captives, and skeletal analysis suggests a leaner animal of roughly 10 to 14 kg that could move briskly. Renewed digging at the Mare aux Songes marsh from 2005 has yielded thousands of bones, and rats and macaques, as much as the sailors' hogs, are now blamed for finishing off the eggs and young.
Written for this edition, 2026.