CT Scans of the World's Only Two Complete Dodo Skulls Suggest the Bird Hunted by Smell and Touch, Possibly at Dusk

Two complete dodo skulls exist. One sits in the collections of the Natural History Museum Denmark in Copenhagen, where it has been for centuries; the other belongs to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. An international team led by researchers at the University of Lethbridge in Canada has now used both to attack a question that has been argued over for roughly 300 years: how did the dodo actually experience the world?

The answer, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, is that the bird's senses appear to have differed in several meaningful ways from those of its closest living relatives, the pigeons and doves. The dodo may not have been strictly a daytime animal, and may have moved or foraged around dawn and dusk. It appears to have leaned more heavily on smell than modern pigeons do. And its oversized upper beak looks well suited to gathering tactile information from its surroundings.

"The dodo is one of the world's most recognizable extinct animals, yet surprisingly little is known about how it actually lived," said Peter Andrew Hosner, associate professor and curator of birds at the Natural History Museum Denmark and a co-author of the study. "Its behavior and foraging ecology have been debated for centuries. Having access to one of only two complete dodo skulls has given us a unique opportunity to compare the dodo with its closest living relatives and gain new insights into how it experienced and interacted with its environment."

The opening came from a renovation. Preparations for a new museum building and permanent galleries in Copenhagen, scheduled to open in 2027, gave the researchers a chance to study the rare skull in far greater detail than usual, using high-resolution CT scanning that produced an extremely detailed three-dimensional model without touching the specimen.

The technique works because of what a brain leaves behind. As it develops, it presses against the surrounding bone, and those impressions survive long after the tissue is gone. By digitally reconstructing the cavity where the brain once sat, researchers can infer something about how an extinct animal processed information.

"Studying extinct animals is a bit like detective work," said Christy Anna Hipsley, an associate professor at the Natural History Museum Denmark and a co-author. "Although the dodo's brain disappeared centuries ago, it left an imprint on the inside of the skull. By digitally reconstructing those spaces and comparing them with the brains of living birds, we can begin to piece together how the dodo sensed, behaved, and interacted with the world around it."

The study drew on CT data from three dodo skulls, including both complete specimens. Having two intact skulls to compare directly mattered: it let the team work out which anatomical features were genuinely characteristic of the species rather than quirks of one individual.

"The dodo's skull is unlike that of any living bird, which makes it both fascinating and difficult to interpret," Hipsley said. "By comparing digital reconstructions of the world's only two complete dodo skulls, we now have a much stronger foundation for identifying which features are truly characteristic of the species and what they can tell us about how the dodo lived."

The findings also cut against a long-running caricature. Popular culture has portrayed the dodo as clumsy and dim, sometimes implying its extinction in the late 17th century on Mauritius was more or less inevitable. The reconstructions offer no support for the idea that the bird had diminished cognitive abilities relative to living pigeons and doves. What they show instead is a distinctive package of sensory adaptations built up over millions of years of isolation on an island.

The researchers are careful about how far anatomy can be pushed. Skull shape cannot deliver a full account of behavior, and they do not claim it can. But combining scans from multiple specimens, including both complete skulls in existence, lets the field move past centuries of speculation toward interpretations grounded in evidence.

"The dodo has become a symbol of extinction, but in many ways it remains surprisingly mysterious," Hosner said. "Every new piece of evidence helps us move beyond myths and build a more accurate picture of how this extraordinary bird lived before it disappeared."