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50 free Dodo trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The dodo has been extinct for more than 350 years, yet it is one of the most famous birds that ever lived, and this quiz covers what is really known about it. It starts with the animal: a giant flightless pigeon from Mauritius whose closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon, how tall and heavy it was, why it lost the power of flight, what it ate, the gizzard stones it swallowed, and its single-egg clutch. It moves on to the people: the Dutch sailors of 1598 who called it the 'loathsome bird', the Mughal painter who portrayed one in Jahangir's menagerie, Roelant Savery's fat dodos, and the London showman who fed his bird pebbles in 1638. Then the disappearance and the afterlife: the disputed last sighting of 1662, the pigs and macaques that did more damage than hunters, the schoolmaster who found the bones in the Mare aux Songes swamp, the Oxford head with lead shot in it, Lewis Carroll's stammer, the dodo tree myth, and the bird's place on the coat of arms of Mauritius. Easy questions ask which island and which bird family; hard ones want Dutch etymology, museum specimen histories and DNA dates. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's article on the dodo, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Our Birds and Extinct Animals quizzes go wider.
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Q 01The dodo's home island of Mauritius lies in which body of water?
The Indian Ocean
It sits east of Madagascar; a 'white dodo' once believed to live on nearby Réunion was really a confused memory of an ibis.
Q 02The dodo belonged to which family of birds?
Pigeons and doves
Early scientists variously called it a small ostrich, a rail, an albatross or a vulture before the pigeon idea won out.
Q 03What is the dodo's closest living relative?
The Nicobar pigeon
DNA from the Oxford specimen placed it nearest that Southeast Asian bird, then the crowned pigeons of New Guinea.
Q 04The dodo's closest relative of all, also extinct and flightless, was which bird?
The Rodrigues solitaire
Together they formed the subtribe Raphina, created in 2024 just for the two of them.
Q 05How tall was a dodo?
About 63 to 75 cm
Estimates of its weight in the wild run from about 10 to 17 kg; captive birds painted in Europe were probably overfed.
Q 06What did the dodo swallow to help digest its food?
Gizzard stones
A showman in 1638 fed his dodo pebbles 'as big as nutmegs' and swore she coughed them all up again.
Q 07How many eggs did a dodo clutch reportedly contain?
One
That fits its pigeon ancestry; a 1651 account says the white egg was 'the size of a halfpenny roll'.
Q 08Why is the dodo presumed to have become flightless?
Abundant food and no predators
With no mammals to compete with or flee from, size went up and wings shrank; the same happened to the solitaire on Rodrigues.
Q 09Who made the first recorded mention of the dodo, and when?
Dutch sailors in 1598
The Portuguese had visited Mauritius between 1507 and 1513 but left no record of the bird.
Q 10The last widely accepted sighting of a dodo was in which year?
1662
A 1681 account long held the title, but it is now thought to describe the red rail; the bird was surely gone by 1700.
Q 11The only surviving soft tissue of a dodo is a dried head and what?
A foot
They belonged to the last stuffed dodo, listed in the Tradescant collection in 1656 and moved to the Ashmolean in 1659.
Q 12Most subfossil dodo bones have come from which site on Mauritius?
The Mare aux Songes swamp
Animals apparently got mired there reaching for water in a severe drought around 4,200 years ago.
Q 13Danish zoologist Johannes Reinhardt was ridiculed in 1842 for proposing the dodo was what?
A ground pigeon
Strickland and Melville's 1848 monograph The Dodo and Its Kindred backed him up after dissecting the Oxford head and foot.
Q 21A 17th-century painting attributed to Ustad Mansur probably shows a dodo in whose menagerie?
Emperor Jahangir's
Peter Mundy also claimed to see two dodos in Surat between 1628 and 1633; the slim brown bird is considered one of the most accurate images.
Q 22Which Dutch ship's journal holds the only known sketches of live dodos drawn on Mauritius?
Gelderland
The 1601-1603 journal was only rediscovered in the 1860s; its crew called the bird 'Dronte', meaning 'swollen'.
Q 23Hamon L'Estrange saw a live dodo in 1638 in which city?
London
He was lured in by a picture hung on a cloth in the street; it is the only account that clearly describes a live dodo in Europe.
Q 14Beth Shapiro's 2002 dodo DNA study dated the split between dodo and solitaire ancestors to about when?
23 million years ago
The Mascarene islands are under 10 million years old, so those ancestors must have kept flying for a long while afterwards.
Q 15The Dutch name 'Walghvoghel', first used for the dodo in 1598, means what?
Loathsome bird
Sailors preferred the pigeons and parrots once they had eaten enough dodo, and the name stuck.
Q 16The word 'dodo' most probably comes from Dutch 'Dodaars', which means what?
Fat-arse or knot-arse
It refers to the knot of feathers on the bird's rear; the rival Portuguese 'doudo' (fool) theory is doubted, since the Portuguese never mentioned the bird.
Q 17Who was first to use the word 'dodo' in print, in a 1634 travelogue?
Sir Thomas Herbert
He claimed the Portuguese used the name; Altham had written it in a private letter six years earlier.
Q 18Linnaeus first classified the dodo in which genus, in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae?
Struthio, the ostriches
He later coined Didus ineptus, 'inept dodo', in 1766; Brisson's Raphus of 1760 has priority.
Q 19The dodo's Latin species name cucullatus means what?
Hooded
Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg first used it in 1635, as Cygnus cucullatus, the 'hooded swan'.
Q 20Which Dutch painter was the most prolific illustrator of the dodo, with at least twelve depictions?
Roelant Savery
He often tucked it into a lower corner; his 'Edwards's Dodo' hung beside the dried foot at the British Museum until the 1840s.
Q 24At least how many transported dodos are inferred to have reached their destinations alive?
Eleven
Julian Hume pieced the number together from accounts, paintings and specimens; one went to Emperor Rudolf II's menagerie in Prague.
Q 25Which introduced animals are now thought to have harmed the dodo more than hunting did?
Pigs and macaques
The 17th-century human population never topped 50, but their livestock and crab-eating macaques raided nests and ate the food.
Q 26Sailors who hunted dodos for food especially prized which part?
The gizzard
Some killed the birds only for that organ, considered the tastiest bit.
Q 27Which bird do researchers think later accounts of 'dodos' on Mauritius actually describe?
The red rail
Alfred Newton suggested in 1868 that the name simply moved to the rail after the real dodo vanished.
Q 28Scans in 2018 revealed what inside the Oxford dodo's head?
Lead shot
So the bird was shot, either before it left Mauritius or after it reached Britain.
Q 29Many sources say the Ashmolean Museum did what to its decayed stuffed dodo around 1755?
Burned it, saving only the head and leg
The rescued head and foot are the same ones Strickland and Melville dissected a century later.
Q 30Who found an abundance of subfossil dodo bones in the Mare aux Songes in 1865, after a 30-year search?
George Clark, a schoolmaster
Owen then bought a shipment of bones meant for Newton, sparking a rivalry over who would describe the skeleton first.