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Dead as a Dodo - The Poster Child of Extinction · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: So Kelly.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Alex, how are you?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Today my dead end took me all the way to Austin, Texas, where I'm joining you from the luxurious Dirt Knap City studios.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: I really like what we've done with the place, the decor, the vibe, the lighting.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's all on point.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: This is great.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we socialized last night.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: We did.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: So for those of you who don't know, probably 90% of the conversations that Kelly and I have had in the past two years, you've heard.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: They've been archived and we don't hang out.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: We don't we don't talk much outside of this show.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: And we were able to go out.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: We had we drank some alcohol.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we went to a comedy show, and we went to a nightclub where there were the DJ was um was uh spinning.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: Popping off.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't get in any fights.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Nope.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was it was all in all a successful evening, don't you think?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I it was fantastic.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: And we saw Shang Wang, who's a comedian and was very, very funny.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I highly recommend if you haven't checked out Shang Wang's what is it, Netflix Netflix uh special called what's it called?
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: Sweet and Juicy.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: Sweet and Juicy.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: So if you want to laugh um about ordinary stuff that you wouldn't think would be funny but was hilarious, then yeah, I'd call him an observational comic, um, but uh younger, younger than us.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: He's in his forties, I think.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, in early forties, I think.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: I I and I consider uh myself an observational podcaster.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, is that right?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: What are you observing right now?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well I'm observing that you and I are looking at each other and not through a camera this time.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm observing that Chris is uh mixing us and making us sound good and look good, and I'm observing that uh we're both wearing orange.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're headed to a uh Texas Longhorn football game later today.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: But enough about us.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Enough about us.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: Today I might have the mother of all dead ends, the icon for things that don't exist anymore.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Ooh.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: That that's um that's a big statement.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think that it's a shorthand when you talk about um something about to be not existing anymore, about to go extinct, you invoke this thing.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: You want to try to guess?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: We don't usually try to guess on these, but um Dinosaurs?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: No close.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: The dodo bird.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think people the the saying is they went the way of the dodo.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: The way of the dodo.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's exactly right.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: It means uh Which is not a it's not a uh a kung fu thing or uh or a martial arts thing.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: But it's not dojo.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's the dodo.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's not doo-doo.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll talk a little bit about the etymology of the the dodo also.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: But can you so dodo birds haven't been around since like the 1600s.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: But you can probably picture one in your head, right?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think they have long legs kind of stork-like, and and uh they lay giant eggs, and uh they have like a kind of wide body and a long neck.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: Is that and they don't fly?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: They don't fly, that's the big one.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: They don't fly.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think their legs are as long as as you might imagine.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: They have a big beak, though.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: They b uh a big beak.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: So they were only native to one little island called Mauritius.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: You heard Mauritius?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know what?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: I have a good friend and a fan of this podcast uh named Richard, who has been to Mauritius, told me it was one of the most beautiful places he's ever been.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: And other than him telling me about it, I had never heard of it before.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's east of Madagascar.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know where Madagascar is, it's like an island uh east of Africa.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and then so Mauritius is just east of that.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: And they're flightless, and they don't need to fly because there was a lot of food on the island and no predators.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: So what's the point of flying?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: All their food is right on the ground.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: They're actually the same family as pigeons and doves.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: How big are they?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: About two feet tall and weighing about 30 pounds.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, so they're big birds.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Big fat birds.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, okay.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's when I say pigeons and doves, they're related to that, but they're not like the ones that you see in New York.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: And the closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon, which is beautiful.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like it does not look like those are those are around now, and they have this beautiful blue head.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: The head is completely blue, and then the body is green.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not much of a bird guy, but if I was, that would be my bird.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: I love those things.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: So so wasn't uh Nikola Tesla in love with a pigeon?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder if it was that type of pigeon.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was called, and it's called Nicobar.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe I would be in love with that kind of pigeon.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um do those still exist?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's the closest living relative to the uh dodo bird.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: The Nicobar pigeon.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: So obviously, we you know, we don't we don't have any photographs of what the dodo bird um looked like.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: We've only seen drawing and paintings, but it's also not as old as dinosaurs.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about the 17th century.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, four or five hundred years back.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: When all those sailors that you like to talk about were were um sailing around the the world, uh the the Dutch sailors and the pirates sailors.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, all those guys.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so they were kind of brownish gray, we we think, based on the writings of the sailors.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: They had like a naked head and a black, yellow, and green beak.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then the Dutch sailors used to hunt them.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you you can imagine being hungry, and you come up on this island, there's these birds.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's like a turkey.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: So people started writing about it in the late 1500s, and then the last time they ever anybody ever reported seeing was was in 1662.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that's only like it's not even 70-year period where people are talking about these birds.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: And some thought they were a myth because they were just so different than everything else.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: There was that were big.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: And um now we do have a skull.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't have a skull, but a museum.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Where there's a skull of a dodo?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and they had a dried head, and every now and then they find um material on that island that might have been dodo bird, fossil material.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we don't know a lot about that other than the what the sailors say about them.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the original name, the Dutch name, and you know I love a good Dutch name.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: Those all those extra consonants and vowels they throw in there.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the dodo, I think, uh as you'll see here, have been kind of uh um dumped on, made fun of, um just th th they're unnecessarily, but like so the original name was uh Vog Vogvogel, Vogvogel, Vogvogel, Vogvogel.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: And from the word Vogue meaning taste tasteless or sickly, and Vogel meaning bird.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: That is German as well.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: Vogel.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like a tasteless bird, Vogelfogel.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: And like a tasteless joke.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it was translated to German as Volksstock, Volkstok.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: Volksstock, okay.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the Portuguese used to call them penguins.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they call them pin pignon means small wings, and I think that's kind of what the penguin so I don't know, there was a translation thing there.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: They think that the word dodo probably came from the Dutch word dodor, which means sluggard, or dodors, which means fat arst.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: Dodors.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: You you sluggard, you fat earst sluggard.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's just mean.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's mean.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: They're calling them like tasteless.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, they're not trying to be eaten in the first place.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: So don't insult them by eating them and then and then saying I don't even like these things.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: They probably taste like chicken.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure they did.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, probably well, maybe they did.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I don't know if they knew what chicken tasted like.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're just eating whatever they can get their hands on those things.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: Chickens, chickens are also flightless birds, though.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: Are they always flightless?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't think chickens.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think they can kind of like glide a little bit, but they can't get off the ground.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: If you're about to catch one, I think it flies away.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it it it's sort of uh like three feet away.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: It kind of hops and uses its wings.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: I think they're hard to catch, though.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: Chickens?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever done that?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: I used to have a chicken.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: I used to have a chicken named Bucky Boo.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: Bucky Boo Shores.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: And Bucky Boo's had a last name.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: Bucky Boo uh laid a giant egg that was in the Pasadena Citizen when we lived in Pasadena, Texas, and it was seven and a half inches around.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: And a triple yolk.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: Was that the goal to get like the biggest egg you could?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't we didn't do anything.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: The chicken just did it.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: The chicken laid giant eggs.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: It had a diet of dog food and cockroaches, and I think that's what really made it able to lay those big eggs.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: That probably made it tasteless.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: No, the eggs were fantastic.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: No, I mean the chicken.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, we never ate the chicken.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: The chicken ended up the chicken, unfortunately, I think a chicken hawk got to it and it ended up um dying.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's called the circle of life.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's bear it's buried somewhere in Huffman, Texas, right now.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a guy, Sir Thomas Herbert, that wrote about Dodos in 1634, and he was a sailor, and he claimed that the Portuguese called him Dodos.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: And um the Portuguese word for fool is doido.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Doido, okay.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: And some say that the bird the call of the bird, you know, a lot of birds are named after their call, and they're like a whipper whale.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: The call.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Whipperwheel.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: They say the call was doo-doo, doo-doo, or maybe do-do.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, okay.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: So there's actually a genus, and I'm not gonna get into the whole, you know, species and genus and classification, but there's a genus called uh Didas Ineptus that was invented in uh six 1766, which means inept dodo.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's just so rude, isn't it?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: It just seems well, it's descriptive.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it kind of the I'm sure the bird, when it was on its own, did just fine.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: But when you observed it as an outsider, because most birds can fly, most birds probably do have predators, so they have to be able to defend themselves.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Most birds probably were afraid of people because they knew better.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: These birds on an isolated isolated island probably weren't afraid of people.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: They just walk right up to you and you grab it by the neck and wring its neck and then pluck its feathers and then put it on the spittle.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: But we assign human qualities and calling it lazy and stupid, and you know, when actually it's living its best life, right?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: So nowadays a dodo is a slang for a stupid person.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: And they were saying these birds were stupid because they were easily caught.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and like you said, to go the way of the dodo means you're about to be extinct.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know what really got the do dodo dude, not doo doo, uh the dodo on the map was Alice in Wonderland.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Alice's Adventures in Wonderland came out in 1865, and there's a character in that book about that's the dodo bird.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and that's how it kind of got into the mainstream and and otherwise we would have forgotten about it.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Probably.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Probably.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: But in Mauritius, they don't let you forget about it.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: They're very proud of the dodo, even though it doesn't exist anymore.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's on their coat of arms, it's on their coins, it's on their rupees, their their paper money, like the watermark has the dodo.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh, if you go there and fill out the immigration form, it's it's like watermarked on the back of the dodo is.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're very proud of the dodo.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I'll I'll end this with a poem.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: And this is from uh obscure book uh by Hilaire Belloch called Bad Child's Book of Beasts.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Bad child, not a not a good child.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: This is to read to bad kids.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's like scare 'em.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's a monster book, and yeah you read about these beasts, and it's supposed to get them in line.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: It came out in 1896.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a it's a bad poem, too.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a good poem.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it's not AI.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: I it was written by a real person.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know why it's not AI?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's not intelligent.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's not this is a bad poem.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's authentic and human.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's A-H.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: The dodo used to walk around and take the sun and air.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: The sun yet warms his native ground.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: The dodo is not there.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: The voice which used to squawk and squeak is now forever dumb.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yet, may you see his bones and beak all in the museum.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think we should set that to music.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: The dodo used to walk around and take the sun and air.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: The sun yet wants his native ground.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: The dodo is not there.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: The voice which used to squawk and scream is now forever dumb.