The dodo is a terminated flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Mauritius, which is east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The dodo's nearest hereditary relative was the additionally wiped out Rodrigues solitaire. The two framed the subfamily Raphinae, a clade of wiped out flightless birds that were a piece of the family including pigeons and birds. The nearest living relative of the dodo is the Nicobar pigeon. A white dodo was once remembered to have existed on the close by island of Réunion, however it is currently accepted that this supposition that was simply disarray in view of the likewise terminated Réunion ibis and canvases of white dodos.

Fossil remains show the dodo was around 1 meter (3 ft 3 in) tall and may have weighed 10.6-17.5 kg (23-39 lb) in nature. The dodo's appearance in life is confirmed exclusively by drawings, canvases, and composed accounts from the seventeenth hundred years. Since these pictures fluctuate significantly, and since just a portion of the outlines are known to have been drawn from live examples, the dodos' careful appearance in life stays unsettled, and little is had some significant awareness of its way of behaving. It has been portrayed with caramel dim plumage, yellow feet, a tuft of tail feathers, a dim, exposed head, and a dark, yellow, and green snout. It utilized gizzard stones to assist with processing its food, which is remembered to have included organic products, and its principle environment is accepted to have been the forest in the drier waterfront areas of Mauritius. One record expresses its grip comprised of a solitary egg. It is assumed that the dodo became flightless in view of the prepared accessibility of plentiful food sources and an overall shortfall of hunters on Mauritius. However the dodo has generally been depicted as being fat and ungainly, it is currently remembered to have been all around adjusted for its biological system.

The main recorded notice of the dodo was by Dutch mariners in 1598. Before very long, the bird was pursued by mariners and intrusive species, while its natural surroundings was being obliterated. The last broadly acknowledged locating of a dodo was in 1662. Its annihilation was not quickly seen, and a believed it to be a legend. In the nineteenth hundred years, research was directed on a little amount of stays of four examples that had been brought to Europe in the mid seventeenth 100 years. Among these is a dried head, the main delicate tissue of the dodo that remains today. From that point forward, a lot of subfossil material has been gathered on Mauritius, generally from the Mare aux Songes swamp. The annihilation of the dodo inside under a long time of its revelation pointed out the already unnoticed issue of human contribution in the vanishing of whole species. The dodo accomplished broad acknowledgment from its job in the tale of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and it has since turned into an apparatus in mainstream society, frequently as an image of elimination and oldness.