 The dodos on this islet may not necessarily have been the last members of the species . The last claimed sighting of a dodo was reported in the hunting records of Isaac Johannes Lamotius in 1688 . Statistical analysis of these records by Roberts and Solow gives a new estimated extinction date of 1693 , with a 95 % confidence interval of 1688 – 1715 . The authors also pointed out that because the last sighting before 1662 was in 1638 , the dodo was probably already quite rare by the 1660s , and thus a disputed report from 1674 by an escaped slave cannot be dismissed out of hand . 
