Thanks to Varmints! podcast for suggesting the dodo for this week's topic. And thanks to Two Clams Gaming podcast for suggesting clams as this week's topic. It's two suggestions in one fun episode! Learn all about that most famous of extinct birds and all about a thing that tastes great deep-fried. (Well, okay, everything tastes great deep-fried. But you know what I mean.) The dodo: A giant clam and its algae pals: Stop, thief! Put that clam down! The disco clam looks as awesome as its name implies. It looks like a Muppet clam: Calyptogena magnifica hanging out around a hydrothermal vent: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. We’re getting backed up on suggestions, so I’m going to combine two in one episode today even though they don’t really have anything to do with each other. The first suggestion is from the podcast Varmints, a super fun podcast about animals. They want to know about the dodo. After that, we’ll go on to learn about clams. Yes, clams! Totally not anything to do with dodos, but the hosts at Two Clams Gaming suggested it. That’s another fun podcast, this one about video games—which you may have guessed. I’ll have links to both podcasts in the show notes for you to check out. The dodo isn’t just extinct, it’s famously extinct. Dead as a dodo. That makes it difficult to research the dodo, too—type “dodo” into the search bar at Science Daily, for instance, and you get a ton of hits that have nothing to do with the actual dodo bird, like the article that says “Researchers believe they now know why the supersonic trans-Atlantic Concorde aircraft went the way of the dodo.” I don’t care. I’m here for the birds. Lots of animals and birds have gone extinct over the years, unfortunately. Why is the dodo special? The first known sighting of a dodo was in 1598 by Dutch sailors who stopped by the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. The last known sighting of a dodo was in 1662, just 64 years after those Dutch sailors noticed a weird-looking bird walking around. The dodo went extinct so quickly, and was so little known, that for a couple of centuries afterwards many people assumed it was just a sailor’s story. A big stupid bird that couldn’t fly that would walk right up to a sailor and let itself be killed? No way was that real. But there were remains of dodos, and in the 19th century scientists gathered up what they could find and studied them. More remains were found on Mauritius. Pretty soon researchers had a pretty good idea of what had happened. The dodo had no predators on Mauritius so was able to live in a birdie garden of Eden, eating fruit and nuts, wandering around admiring the scenery, making new dodos. It grew big and happy, lost the ability to fly, and nested on the ground since almost nothing was around that might eat its eggs. Then humans showed up, happy to eat not just the eggs but the meat of any dodos they could find, although reports were that while the meat tasted pretty good, it was really tough. What the sailors didn’t eat, the animals they brought with them did, like pigs and dogs. It was a stark and clear picture of human-caused extinction, shocking to the Victorian naturalists who studied it. The dodo became a cautionary tale and early rallying cry for conservation. We all have a mental image of what the dodo looks like just because it’s appeared in so many cartoons and children’s stories, from Alice in Wonderland to that Madagascar movie. But what did the dodo actually look like? Well, it looked just like the cartoon versions of itself. This really was a silly-looking bird. It was big, over three feet tall, with brown or gray feathers, a floofy tuft of gray feathers as a tail, big yellow feet like a chicken’s, and a weird head. The feathers stopped around the forehead if birds had actual foreheads, making it look sort of like it was wearing a hood.