No merely dead, but most sincerely dead, in fact, the dodo's extinct Jim ...

Dodo skeleton, Museum of Comparative Zoology

In a Huffington Post article from yesterday, "Dodo Extinction Came Later Than Previously Thought, 17th Century Observations Suggest", the author, Douglas Main discusses the date of the extinction of the dodo.

The debate, such as it is, is simply a fine point to some extent. Did the dodo depart the planet in the 1660s or the 1690s?

In my 17 August 2010 post ("Where have all the dodos gone?") I discussed statistical evidence that, in case anyone wondered, the dodo is indeed extinct (to a great factor of certainty).

Unlike the last Passenger Pigeon [Ectopistes migratorius]  (Martha, who died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914) or the last Thylacine (Benjamin, dying in the Beaumaris Zoo, Tasmania in 1936), the last dodo, whether it died in the 1660s or thirty years later, will never be known.

• Also of interest might be my post, "Of dodos and scholarly publishing ..." (11 May 2012).

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Museum fur Naturkunde (Berlin): Dodo bones