Extinct flightless bird ( Raphus cucullatus ) of Mauritius, first seen by Portuguese sailors about 1507.
Humans and the animals they introduced had exterminated the dodo by 1681. It weighed about 50 lbs (23 kg) and had blue-gray plumage, a big head, a 9-in. (23-cm) blackish bill with a reddish hooked tip, small useless wings, stout yellow legs, and a tuft of curly feathers high on its rear end. The Réunion solitaire ( R. solitarius ), also driven to extinction, may have been a white version of the dodo. Partial museum specimens and skeletons are all that remain of the dodo.
Restoration of a dodo ( Raphus cucullatus )
By courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University