BIRDS 



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dodo till the year 1868, when a large number of its bones were dug up in 

 a marsh in Mauritius known as Mare-aux-Songes. At the beginnino- of the 

 nineteenth century this swamp and the adjacent land were covered with large 

 trees, the fruit of which probably served the dodos as food. Here those great 

 birds seem to have lived and died in peace, the bones showing no signs that they 

 met violent deaths. 



Another member of the same extinct family — Dididce — is the solitaire, 

 Pesophaps solitarius, of Rodriguez, a small island lying to the eastward of 

 Mauritius. A less ungainly bird than the dodo, the solitaire had a longer neck 



and legs, and a smaller beak. The males stood 33 inches in height, but the 

 females were 6 inches shorter. Discovered by the French voyager Francois 

 Leguat in 1691, the solitaire was last mentioned as being alive in the year 

 1761. From time to time a few of its bones were found, but in 1864 a discovery 

 in a cave led to such a thorough exploration that in the course of five years an 

 enormous number of its remains were collected, and from these several more or 

 less nearly complete skeletons have been mounted, and are exhibited in various 

 museums. A remarkable peculiarity in the structure of the solitaire is the 

 presence of a bony knob on the fore part of the wings of the males. According to 

 Leguat's account, the males were very combative and fought with their wings, when 

 these knobs striking together made a noise compared to the report of a pistol, 



