Dodos were flight-less birds that once lived in the dense forests of Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean. Today, everything we know about dodos comes from personal reports and from studying their bones and fossils. Dodos were round grey birds with large hooked beaks. Their wings were small and weak—much too small to lift their big bodies. Dodos weighed up to fifty pounds. They built nests on the ground and ate mostly fruits and seeds that fell from trees. They became extinct in the 1680s, only eighty years after they first were discovered! Some people think they disappeared because sailors thought they were delicious, but they really died out because settlers introduced new predators like pigs and monkeys. Originally, there were no mammals on the island, and so dodos had no natural enemies. Dodos aren’t the only animals of Mauritius to disappear. Of forty-five native bird species, only twenty-one survived human settlement.