We have all had that grandparent or mother who has called us the infamous ‘Dodo’ for doing something comically stupid, the flightless bird from Mauritius in the Indian Ocean that met its extinction roughly 300 years ago and still plays a role in our scientific culture. That being said, scientists largely had gaps in their information about the bird, it wasn’t until recently scientist discovered new data about how the bird actually lived before extinction.

The bird was brought back into the limelight when Scientists discovered using high tech 3-d laser scanners new bones not previously archived when capturing scans to better understand how the animal moved around. Leon Classens, the head researcher on the recent study  and associate professor at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, conveyed how the new 3-D scanners are used to reconstruct the bodies of the Dodo digitally, to give insights on how the bird walked and moved around. This will give researches a new avenue to understand the bird as never before seen and give insights on its environment and its niche inside that environment.

The new bones under analysis for the first time were the kneecaps, a skeleton of the bird with original proportions, a new ankle bone and a discovery in the difference of the calculations of the muscle forces generated by the dodo. Ultimately scientist are still learning about these new bones and movements discovered from 3-D printing.

There is only a single Dodo skeleton known in existence to have survived and be intact. Some partial skeletons have been unearthed by the team at the university have the only one intact and for the first time since its discovery in 1903 it has been examined by researchers. The anatomy of the dodo skeleton has never in history been described in any great detail until now.