When Claessens and his team examined the dodo’s wings, they found pronounced bumps, ridges, and depressions where the muscles would have attached to the bones. These well-defined muscle impressions suggest that the dodo’s wings were not withered, worthless appendages but in active use. One possibility is that the birds used their wings for balance, especially when moving quickly. “It's like walking a tightrope—being able to flutter these wings, being able to stretch them out, gives you some capacity for improved balance,” Claessens says.

While Claessens and his colleagues were analyzing the dodo’s skeleton, another group of scientists was trying to make sense of the dodo mind. The research team, based at the American Museum of Natural History, used CT scans of a dodo skull to create virtual, three-dimensional models of the extinct bird’s brain. The scientists also created similar brain models for eight closely related species, including several types of modern pigeons and the Rodrigues solitaire, another extinct flightless bird that lived on an island near Mauritius. The dodo and the solitaire, the researchers reported in February, both had enlarged olfactory bulbs, which is unusual for birds. The finding suggests that the dodo may have had an enhanced sense of smell, an adaptation that could have helped it sniff out ripe fruit and other food in the island’s thick vegetation.

The dodo’s brain was of completely average size; the ratio of its brain volume to its total body mass was similar to that of modern pigeons, highly trainable birds with a talent for visual discrimination and navigation. “Because the dodo's brain volume is completely proportional to its body size, we made the jump to say that it's probably not super dumb, which is what the legends say about dodos,” says Eugenia Gold, the study’s lead author. Of course, she acknowledges, brain size isn’t a perfect proxy for intelligence. “So that's a big caveat of our study, but when you can't observe the bird directly because it's extinct, brain volume gives you at least one metric to sort of get a handle on this,” she says. (The dodo is not the only extinct species we’ve underestimated; scientific evidence indicates that Neanderthals—commonly depicted as dumb, lumbering brutes—engaged in a variety of sophisticated behaviors, including tool making and cave painting.)

Further insights are emerging from the work of paleoecologists and geologists, who have been reconstructing the dodo’s island habitat. For much of its history, Mauritius would have been a tough and turbulent place for wild animals to live. It was volcanically active and regularly struck by cyclones, which could cause severe food shortages. Extreme climatic shifts led to long periods of severe drought, fueling wildfires and mass animal die-offs. When one such megadrought struck 4,200 years ago, a shallow freshwater lake in island’s Mare aux Songes region began drying up. As thirsty animals crowded around the shrinking water surface, they left nutrient-rich droppings that fed the growth of toxic bacteria. Many thousands of animals, from at least 22 different species, perished as the lake transformed into a muddy, poisonous swamp. “We are not sure if animals died there because they drank the water and then subsequently died of this toxic cyanobacteria or if they died because they couldn’t drink enough,” says Erik de Boer, a paleoecologist at the University of Amsterdam who authored a 2015 paper on the die-off. (Some critters likely also simply got mired in the muck.)