The dodo, a large flightless bird once native exclusively to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, has become perhaps the most widely recognised symbol of human-caused extinction, despite having gone extinct less than a century after Europeans first encountered it. Having evolved for countless generations in complete isolation, with no natural land predators present on the island, the dodo had lost the evolutionary pressures that typically favour flight or defensive behaviours in birds, leaving it remarkably unafraid of, and vulnerable to, the sailors who began arriving on Mauritius in the late 16th century. While direct hunting by sailors for food is often cited as the primary cause of the dodo's extinction, historical and ecological evidence suggests the reality was considerably more complex. The introduction of non-native species, including pigs, rats, and monkeys, brought inadvertently or deliberately by European ships, likely posed an even greater threat, as these animals readily preyed upon dodo eggs and chicks in ground-level nests that had never before needed to withstand such predation pressure. Habitat destruction, driven by deforestation to support growing colonial settlements, further compounded these pressures on the dodo's already vulnerable population. By 1681, fewer than a hundred years after the first recorded European sighting, the dodo had vanished entirely, becoming one of the earliest and most well-documented cases of an extinction directly caused by human activity and its associated ecological consequences. The speed and completeness of the dodo's disappearance would later serve as an influential early example in the developing scientific understanding of extinction as a genuine biological phenomenon.