 The French explorer François Leguat was the first to refer to the bird as the " solitaire " ( referring to its solitary habits ) , but it has been suggested that he borrowed the name from a 1689 tract by Marquis Henri Duquesne , his sponsor , mentioning the Réunion solitaire . The bird was first scientifically named in 1789 as a species of dodo ( Didus solitarius , based on Leguat 's description ) by Johann Friedrich Gmelin in the thirteenth edition of Systema Naturae . Hugh Edwin Strickland and Alexander Gordon Melville suggested the common descent of the Rodrigues solitaire and the dodo in 1848 . They dissected the only known dodo specimen with soft tissue , comparing it with the few Rodrigues solitaire remains then available . 
