Scientists on Friday announced the discovery of huge cache of dodo bones from an apparent "mass grave" of the extinct creatures on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, the only place on earth the flightless birds lived in the wild.
The joint Dutch-Mauritian research team uncovered more than more 700 specimens, including part of one dodo's unusually shaped beak and the bones of several dodo chicks, believed to be between 2,000 and 3,000 years old near a sugar plantation in a swampy area known as "Mare aux Songes" on the southeast corner of the island, they said.
"This new find will allow for the first scientific research into and reconstruction of the world in which the dodo lived, before western man landed on the island of Mauritius and wiped out the species," the team said in a statement released by the Dutch Natural History Museum in Leiden.
"All the bones were found in one layer, and, therefore suggest a mass grave," it said, adding that in addition to dodo bones, fossilized remains of other creatures, including other extinct bird species and giant tortoises, and fauna.
The discovery marks the first time an intact layer of dodo remains has been found with animals and plants that perished "en masse" in what may have been a natural disaster and the first dodo bone finds in the area since 1920, the team said.
The oddly built dodo, which weighed around 23kg when fully grown, was native only to Mauritius and was driven to extinction within 200 years of the arrival of the first Europeans on the island around 1505 when Portuguese explorers first landed.
By 1681, the clumsy birds were reported to have been wiped out by human hunters and the dogs, pigs and rats the Europeans had brought to Mauritius.
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