The flightless dodo, Raphus cucullatus, was native to the island of Mauritius, in the south-western Indian Ocean.

On 20 September 1598, a Dutch fleet commanded by Admiral Wybrant van Warwijck found a channel through the reef encircling Mauritius, and initiated the permanent settlement of the island.Less than a century later, the dodo was extinct, and other species followed rapidly. A close relative, Pezophaps solitaria, lived on the nearby island of Rodrigues, but suffered a similar fate to the dodo.

A model of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus), covered in swan and goose feathers. This extinct, large, flightless bird was probably much more upright and graceful than depicted in many images. There are no stuffed dodos in existence. Although the dodo is probably the most famous bird in the world, we know very little about its biology.

Contemporary accounts describe the taste of their meat, but give little or no information about their feeding, their mating rituals, their calls or other behaviour.Before the Dutch claimed Mauritius in the late 1500s, this large, flightless bird had no natural predators and laid its eggs on the ground. This made them an easy target for introduced species such as rats and pigs.No genuine dodo eggs are known, although ostrich eggs have been passed off as dodo eggs.

Raphus cucullatus is known from numerous bones, specimen fragments, reports and paintings from Mauritius (Strickland and Melville 1848). It was last reported from an offshore islet by Iversen in 1662 (Cheke 1987), and although there was a report by an escaped slave in 1674 and statistical techniques indicate that it is likely to have persisted until 1690 (Roberts and Solow 2004), it is generally considered that all references to "dodos" thereafter refer to Red Rail Aphanapteryx bonasia .

Although many pictures and stories place the dodo along the shores of Mauritius, it was actually a forest-dwelling bird. The island of Mauritius is home to a variety of biomes, such as plains, small mountains, forests, and reefs all along the shores. However, the dodo made its home primarily in the forest.