The extinct flightless pigeon has captured imaginations for over 400 years. Experts and artists are now revealing how much we have distorted what the dodo was really like – nimble and slender, with a formidable beak.

When Karen Fawcett embarked on creating as accurate a model of a dodo as possible, she knew she was taking on a serious challenge.

As a palaeoartist, who creates artworks of prehistoric life based on scientific evidence, Fawcett is used to not relying on photographs to guide her work. But information on the dodo was especially scarce, she says.

"I've never seen this bird, and all I've got is some little tantalising clues about what it was like and… artist drawings and paintings of dodos," says Fawcett, who created the dodo model in her studio in Durham, UK, in 2019.

These artists often hadn't even seen a dodo themselves, she says, or were painting from taxidermy models or unhappy, captive birds in European menageries. The dodo's unusually large wings and small feet were also a challenge, she says: everything about it was "almost upside down" compared to modern birds. It all made the task all the more tantalising, though. "The dodo, it's so iconic, everybody knows what it is," she says. "I mean, there's even an emoji of a dodo on a phone. Yet nobody has seen one."

From the first encounter with dodos by Dutch sailors on the island of Mauritius in 1598 to their extinction a century later, there are plenty of depictions of this unusual ground-dwelling bird (which was, in fact, a large flightless pigeon). But disentangling truth from myth is tricky, especially when modern-day research has shown dodos were anything but the dumpy, clumsy, stupid birds so often represented.

The dodo has long been seen as an iconic image of "our ability to just destroy things", says Neil Gostling, a palaeobiologist at the University of Southampton in the UK. But today, researchers like Gostling – and the occasional artist with a scientific eye, like Fawcett – are probing the past to uncover everything they can about the real dodo, from what it really looked like and behaved, to why it evolved as it did and how it ended up among the first human-caused extinctions in modern times.

What they are discovering is firmly overturning the image of the dodo as a stupid, clumsy animal somehow destined for extinction. These scientists hope that finding out more about the dodo, and even scouring its genetics, could even help to address our current day extinction crisis.

But fascinating as it is to pursue our long-lived obsession with the dodo, can it really tell us anything about wildlife, and how to save it, today?

In unravelling the truth about the dodo, there's long been little to go on. Despite several live dodos being transported to Europe in the 17th Century, there are few remnants left anywhere today: an emaciated, mummified head known as the Oxford dodo along with a piece of skin once attached to this (these are the only surviving soft tissue); the remains of a feather; a head in Copenhagen; part of a beak in Prague; and plaster casts of a mouldy foot, itself lost sometime in the 19th Century.

Julian Hume, an artist and avian palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London who has published nearly 40 papers on the dodo, reckons he is the only person to have illustrated all these surviving parts of the bird. As well as these, he says, there are perhaps some 20 or 25 fossilised skeletons with some kind of skull material. But all of these, bar two near-complete skeletons from single individuals and a third partial one, are composite skeletons made from a jumble of bones from different dodos.

Apart from this, all we have are paintings from the time the dodo was alive, largely from taxidermy or captive birds. We also have a lot of inherited misbeliefs.

The dodo began capturing imaginations almost as soon as it was discovered in the 16th Century. "It's just a weird, weird bird," says Gostling. "It would have stood nearly a metre tall (3.3ft)… No one would have seen anything like it in Europe, just this remarkable animal. I think people took to it."

The biggest misconception of the dodo is "that it's sort of fat, stupid and deserved to go extinct", says Gostling. "It wasn't. It was adapted to its environment, and it had been doing very well… The thing that it wasn't adapted to were rats, cats, pigs and goats, and obviously people."

And it's only really in the last decade that people have started to question the negative image of the dodo, says Gostling. "It's so pervasive." Fawcett's sculpture, he says, is the most accurate model yet made.

Before she began working on it in 2019, Fawcett spent years finding out all she could about the dodo. She soon learned that many depictions were best left avoided. Among them was the famous dodo painting by Dutch artist Roelant Savery, painted in the 1620s. "I can tell you, there's lots wrong with that," she says. "It's more [like a] swan", she says: pigeons don't have "this bulbous, sticky-out bit at the front" of the neck. "And the belly on it... it's just obese, basically."

Savery is thought to have worked off a bad taxidermy bird, and apparently wildly exaggerated some........

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