 The dodo was variously declared a small ostrich , a rail , an albatross , or a vulture , by early scientists . 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 . 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 . Strickland stated that although not identical , these birds shared many distinguishing features of the leg bones , otherwise known only in pigeons . 
