Imam al-Sadiq (PBUH) said: The one who learns knowledge and acts accordingly, and teaches it for the sake of Allah, will be called magnificently in heavens.

This view was met with ridicule, but was later supported by English naturalists Hugh Edwin Strickland and Alexander Gordon Melville in their 1848 monograph The Dodo and Its Kindred, which attempted to separate myth from reality. After dissecting the preserved head and foot of the specimen at the Oxford University Museum and comparing it with the few remains then available of the extinct Rodrigues solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria), they concluded that the two were closely related.

Imam as-Sadiq (PBUH) said: Try to obtain knowledge and ornament it with patience and dignity; and be humble for the one who learns knowledge from you.

Imam al-Sadiq (PBUH) said: Be careful of your knowledge and see from whom you get it.

The dodo was variously declared a small ostrich, a rail, an albatross, or a vulture, by early scientists.[3] In 1842, Danish zoologist Johannes Theodor Reinhardt proposed that dodos were ground pigeons, based on studies of a dodo skull he had discovered in the collection of the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

Imam Ali (PBUH) said: The one who seeks for knowledge is like a warrior in the cause of religion for the way of Allah.

Imam al-Baqir (PBUH) said: Try to learn knowledge because learning it is a good action and study is itself a worship.

The extinction of the dodo less than a century after its discovery called attention to the previously unrecognized problem of human involvement in the disappearance of entire species. The dodo achieved widespread recognition from its role in the story of Alice Adventures in Wonderland, and it has since become a fixture in popular culture, often as a symbol of extinction and obsolescence.

The last widely accepted sighting of a dodo was in 1662. Its extinction was not immediately noticed, and some considered the bird to be a myth. In the 19th century, research was conducted on a small quantity of remains of four specimens that had been brought to Europe in the early 17th century. Among these is a dried head, the only soft tissue of the dodo that remains today. Since then, a large amount of subfossil material has been collected on Mauritius, mostly from the Mare aux Songes swamp.

It is presumed that the dodo became flightless because of the ready availability of abundant food sources and a relative absence of predators on Mauritius. Though the dodo has historically been portrayed as being fat and clumsy, it is now thought to have been well-adapted for its ecosystem.

The first recorded mention of the dodo was by Dutch sailors in 1598. In the following years, the bird was hunted by sailors and invasive species, while its habitat was being destroyed.