Extinction troubled us long before we had a name for it. The original mascot for the loss of species, even before the concept was understood, was the dodo. The bird — fat and flightless, found by 17th ...

The dodo lived solely in Mauritius and we know it was extinct by around 1680, less than 100 years after humans inhabited its island home. But we don't know exactly how it got there in the first place, ...

was the dodo. The bird – fat and flightless, found by 17th-century European sailors on the island of Mauritius – fell victim to one of the earliest known extinctions caused by Western humans.

In 1874, Charles Darwin and his scientific colleagues cited the dodo in a plea to Mauritius’s colonial governor to save local tortoises. “It is a matter of lasting regret,” they wrote ...