The wildlife of Mauritius, a tropical island in the Indian Ocean just 500 miles east of Madagascar, could not have known the giant shadows cast across the bay in 1598 would signal their doom. The fleet of Dutch ships was akin to the Chicxulub asteroid that had arrived in the Yucatan peninsula some 66 million years earlier.
That rogue rock ended the reign of the dinosaurs in dramatic fashion. The threat posed to their modern-day relatives — creatures like the blue pigeon, the scops owl and the broad-billed parrot — by the Dutch fleet was much more insidious. It wasn't an explosive end. It was a slow burn: The sailors who colonized the island destroyed the natural habitat and introduced alien species like rats, pigs and monkeys, pests that could outcompete the island's native residents for resources.
Some species disappeared before anyone even noticed.
The most enduring emblem of the island's extinct species is, without doubt, the dodo (Raphus cucullatus). It was wiped out no more than a century after the Dutch arrived.