Our realistic-looking plastic dodo bird brings ths marvelous extinct animal "back to life" in your school project or collection. It looks like the real thing and is a wonderful educational toy, useful for shoebox dioramas and other school projects, a collector's item, a gift for your favorite dodo (or dodo fan), and more. Made of solid, rubbery plastic, it measures 2 3/4 inches tall. The body is moulded to look like feathers that almost make it seem real. Its name is moulded into the underside as it is on many of our plastic animals. Be sure to see our other bird and extinct animal toys and gifts.
The dodo, a flightless bird about 3 feet (or 1 meter) tall, was found in only one place in the world - the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. It fed on fruit. The name of this bird is often equated with the condition of extinction - "extinct like the dodo," "dead as a dodo," "gone the way of the dodo bird." Within two hundred years of the arrival of Portuguese sailors on Mauritius in the 1500s, the dodo had become exterminated forever. The bird was last recorded alive in 1663. The starving sailors found the large dodo birds easy prey, as they were not afraid of humans and have been described as "clumsy." In fact, the name "dodo" comes from the word for "fool" in Portuguese. There is some disagreement over how much of the dodo's demise can be blamed directly on human consumption or whether it was the dogs, cats, rats, and pigs introduced to the island that destroyed their eggs. Both played a role. A number of dodos had been brought to Europe before their extinction, where they were variously drawn, painted, and stuffed. Like the bird itself, the dodo's remains, it seems, had also "gone missing," as no complete skeleton had been found for hundreds of years until the discovery by Dutch scientists of a dodo "mass grave" in 2005. Even a complete taxidermied dodo can no longer be seen, as the last surviving one in Oxford was seriously damaged. However, in recent years a slimmer replica has been made based on new data about the proportions of the bird. The dodo gained its place as the most famous extinct animal partly because of its appearance in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The dodo was a favorite of the author, "Lewis Carroll," whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. It is said that he stuttered, and often pronounced his name "Do-Do-Dodgson."
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stuffed animals,
plastic animals,
and other toys and gifts from
Tapir and Friends Wildlife World
helps preserve endangered species
and their habitats
All tapirs are endangered species
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P.O. Box 118, Astoria, Oregon 97103, USA
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