With new insight on perhaps one of the most distinguished animals to have gone extinct in human history, Leon Claessens, associate professor of biology at the College of the Holy Cross, has had a busy week sharing his new discoveries about the dodo bird. Using 3D scanners of the only known complete skeleton from a single bird, Claessens has been able to identify how the extinct bird walked, looked, and behaved.
Media outlets across the world have turned to Claessens for his expertise in this area, including the International Business Times. In a recent interview, he describes the importance of the 3D scan of amateur collector Etienne Thirioux’s skeleton of the dodo bird: “The 3D laser surface scans we made of the fragile Thirioux dodo skeleton enable us to reconstruct how the dodo walked, moved and lived to a level of detail that has never been possible before. There are so many outstanding questions about the dodo bird that we can answer with this new knowledge." Read the full article.
Claessens also spoke with Yahoo! News. “We discovered that the anatomy of the dodo we were looking at was not previously described in detail," Claessens said. "There were bones of the dodo that were just unknown to science until now." Read the full article.
Claessens presented his research on Thursday, Nov. 7, at the 74th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, held in Berlin, Germany from Nov. 4 – 8. Two Holy Cross students, Adrienne Randall ’15 and Anna Kimelblatt ‘15, co-presented another poster out of the six dodo posters total that Claessens co-authored.
Media Coverage:
- Delhi Daily News, Nov. 10: "3D scan of Dodo bird's skeleton reveals new kinds of bones"
- Tech Times, Nov. 8: "3D laser scan suggests extinct dodo bird was not fat (and some more)"
- Nature World News, Nov. 7: "New Secrets of the Dodo Revealed"
- The Guardian, Nov. 7: "Animals in the news: in pictures"
- Bird Watching Daily Blog, Nov. 6: "Laser scans of complete Dodo skeleton reveal a little-known bird not doomed to extinction"
- Wired, Nov. 6: "Science Graphic of the Week: 3-D Scanned Dodo"
- Live Science, Nov.6: "Dodo Bird Skeleton Reveals Long-Lost Secrets in 3D Scan"
- Live Science: In Photos, Nov. 6: "The Famous Flightless Dodo Bird"
- Phys.Org, Nov. 6: "New insights into an old bird"
- Discovery Channel's "Daily Planet," Nov. 6 (no link available)
This “Holy Cross in the News” item by Jacqueline Smith ’15.
