<P> Whether the dodo survived the journey is unknown, and the letter was destroyed by fire in the 19th century . The earliest known picture of a dodo specimen in Europe is from a c. 1610 collection of paintings depicting animals in the royal menagerie of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague . This collection includes paintings of other Mauritian animals as well, including a red rail . The dodo, which may be a juvenile, seems to have been dried or embalmed, and had probably lived in the emperor's zoo for a while together with the other animals . That whole stuffed dodos were present in Europe indicates they had been brought alive and died there; it is unlikely that taxidermists were on board the visiting ships, and spirits were not yet used to preserve biological specimens . Most tropical specimens were preserved as dried heads and feet . </P> <P> One dodo was reportedly sent as far as Nagasaki, Japan in 1647, but it was long unknown whether it arrived . Contemporary documents first published in 2014 proved the story, and showed that it had arrived alive . It was meant as a gift, and, despite its rarity, was considered of equal value to a white deer and a bezoar stone . It is the last recorded live dodo in captivity . </P> <P> Like many animals that evolved in isolation from significant predators, the dodo was entirely fearless of humans . This fearlessness and its inability to fly made the dodo easy prey for sailors . Although some scattered reports describe mass killings of dodos for ships' provisions, archaeological investigations have found scant evidence of human predation . Bones of at least two dodos were found in caves at Baie du Cap that sheltered fugitive slaves and convicts in the 17th century, which would not have been easily accessible to dodos because of the high, broken terrain . The human population on Mauritius (an area of 1,860 km or 720 sq mi) never exceeded 50 people in the 17th century, but they introduced other animals, including dogs, pigs, cats, rats, and crab - eating macaques, which plundered dodo nests and competed for the limited food resources . At the same time, humans destroyed the forest habitat of the dodos . The impact of the introduced animals on the dodo population, especially the pigs and macaques, is today considered more severe than that of hunting . Rats were perhaps not much of a threat to the nests, since dodos would have been used to dealing with local land crabs . </P> <P> It has been suggested that the dodo may already have been rare or localised before the arrival of humans on Mauritius, since it would have been unlikely to become extinct so rapidly if it had occupied all the remote areas of the island . A 2005 expedition found subfossil remains of dodos and other animals killed by a flash flood . Such mass mortalities would have further jeopardised a species already in danger of becoming extinct . Yet the fact that the dodo survived hundreds of years of volcanic activity and climactic changes shows the bird was resilient within its ecosystem . </P>

What caused the dodo bird to become extinct
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