Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything

Goodbye

Summary

Some sailors arrived on Mauritius Island, about 1,300 kilometres off the east coast of Madagascar, and while they were bored they decided to hunt and kill the remainder of the famous, flightless birds, the dodo. the dodo was an easy target for the sailors because they have trouble understanding what is going on around them. If you were wanting to find all of the dodos in one area, all you have to do is make one of them squawk, then the rest of them will run over and see what was happening.

In 1755, about 70 years after the death of the last dodo, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the one and only dodo left in existence was getting too old and smelly, so decided to burn it. As a result of this, we now don't know much about the dodo, in fact we know more about some ancient sea monsters than we abou the dodo. But we do know is that they commonly live on the Island of Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest bird of the pigeon family, although their weight was never accurately measured. The remains from the burnt dodo showed us that it was a little over two and a half feet tall, was flightless, and it nested on the ground, which makes it an easy prey for pests.

It is thought that dodos and similar animals would still be alive today if it wasn't for humans. it is because of human activity such as hunting or bringing pests such as pigs, dogs and monkeys onto the island that caused the dodos to go extinct in 1683 - 1693. Nobody knows quite how destructive humans were, but it is a fact that over the last 50,000 years or so, wherever we have gone, animals tended to vanish in astonishingly large numbers. There are many large creatures that are now extinct due to human activity, and are only four types that are able to survive in the world today. These include elephants, hippos, rhinos, and giraffes.

A palaeontologist at the University of Chicago stated that the extinction rate on earth throughout the biological history was one species lost every four years, but now it is nearly 120,000 times that level, making it about 30,000 species every year.

In the 1990's, an Australian naturalist was struck by how little we knew about many extinctions, even fairly recent ones. Wherever you looked there seemed to be gaps in the records, as with the dodo, or not recorded at all. For four years himself and another Australian searched through some of the world's major collections to find out what was lost, what was left behind, and what had never been known at all. The result was a book called A Gap in Nature which, consisting of the full record of many animal extinctions throughout the past 300 years.

The lesson of this chapter is that our presence is bad news for most animals or species. And since we are the cause of many animal extinctions, the least we could do is make sure that we have a full record of each animal that has past, or at least try.

Rebecca.Y