CT scans hint the extinct dodo had a surprisingly sharp sense of smell

The dodo has spent four centuries as a byword for clumsiness and stupidity, an easy target ever since the flightless bird vanished from Mauritius in the seventeenth century. New research using CT scans of the few surviving skulls suggests that reputation is badly misplaced, and that the bird may have navigated its island world with a keen nose and eyes tuned for low light.

By digitally reconstructing the shape of the dodo’s brain from the inside of its skull, scientists found an enlarged region devoted to processing smell and eye sockets that faced forward like an owl’s. Together those features paint a picture of a capable animal adapted to a specific way of life, rather than the bumbling caricature handed down through popular culture.

The study, published in early August 2026 in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, drew on high-resolution CT scans of three of the only complete dodo skulls left in the world. Researchers involved in the work, including a team documented by Flinders University, used the scans to model the size and shape of a brain that has not existed in living form for roughly 350 years.

Reconstructing a brain from empty skulls

No dodo brain survives, so researchers had to work backward from bone. The interior of a bird’s braincase preserves an impression of the organ it once held, and a detailed scan can capture that hollow shape in three dimensions. From those scans the team built a digital cast, known as an endocast, that approximates the outer form of the brain and the relative size of its major structures.

Because complete dodo skulls are so scarce, assembling even a small sample was a challenge. One intact specimen is held at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and another at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, while a third, damaged but reconstructable, is kept at the Smithsonian Institution. Scanning all three allowed the researchers to compare features across individuals rather than relying on a single fragile skull.

The oversized smell center

The most striking finding concerns the olfactory bulbs, the parts of the brain that handle the sense of smell. In the intact specimens, those bulbs appeared unusually large relative to the rest of the brain, a signature typically associated with animals that lean heavily on scent to find food and move through their environment. For a bird long assumed to be dull, the implication is a rich and active sensory life.

A powerful sense of smell would have suited the dodo’s habitat. Foraging across the forest floor of Mauritius for fallen fruit, seeds, and other food, a bird that could sniff out ripeness and locate meals by odor held a real advantage. The enlarged smell center suggests the dodo was not blundering blindly through the undergrowth but sampling its surroundings through a sense that humans tend to underrate in birds.

Eyes built for dim light

Alongside the smell findings, the reconstruction pointed to forward-facing eye sockets reminiscent of an owl’s arrangement. That orientation, combined with other features of the skull, hints that the dodo may have been active in the dimmer parts of the day, at dawn and dusk, or even after dark, rather than being strictly a creature of full daylight.

An animal that relied on smell and moved comfortably in low light fits a very different profile from the daytime dimwit of legend. The picture emerging is of a large, flightless omnivore that gathered information through scent and touch as much as through sight, well matched to the shaded forest floor where it lived and fed.

Rethinking the “bird brain”

Perhaps the most consequential conclusion is also the simplest. The study found that the dodo’s brain was not smaller or less developed than those of its close pigeon relatives, the family to which it belongs. In other words, by the standards of its own lineage, the dodo was entirely ordinary in brainpower, not the evolutionary embarrassment its name has come to imply.

That reframing matters because the dodo’s supposed stupidity has always been more myth than measurement, rooted in the ease with which sailors killed the tame, ground-dwelling bird. The species that became the classic dodo of textbooks and idioms was, on this evidence, a well-adapted animal whose fearlessness reflected an island with no natural predators, not a deficient mind.

What the scans add to a long-gone species

Studying an extinct animal from a handful of skulls will always leave room for caution, and the researchers frame their conclusions as strong hints rather than final proof. Even so, the work shows how modern imaging can pull fresh biological detail out of centuries-old museum specimens that were collected long before such analysis was possible.

The broader lesson reaches past a single bird. The dodo has functioned as shorthand for extinction and folly for generations, and correcting the record restores a measure of dignity to a creature humans drove off the planet. It also underlines how much can still be learned about lost species when new tools are turned on the fragile remains that survive in museum collections.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

More from Morning Overview