 In the 1770s , the French naturalist Comte de <unk> stated that the dodo inhabited both Mauritius and Réunion . It is unclear why he included Réunion , but he also combined accounts about the Rodrigues solitaire and a third bird ( " <unk> de Nazareth " , now thought to be a dodo ) under the same section . English naturalist Hugh Edwin Strickland discussed the old descriptions of the Réunion solitaire in his 1848 book The <unk> and Its <unk> , and concluded it was distinct from the dodo and Rodrigues solitaire . Baron Edmond de <unk> <unk> coined the scientific name <unk> solitarius for the Réunion solitaire in 1848 , apparently making it the type species of the genus , in which he also included two other Mascarene birds only known from contemporary accounts , the red rail and the Réunion swamphen . As the name <unk> had already been used for a different bird by Richard Owen , and the other former names were likewise invalid , Bonaparte coined the new binomial <unk> <unk> in 1854 ( Bourbon was the original French name for Réunion ) . In 1854 , Hermann <unk> placed the solitaire in the same genus as the dodo , and named it <unk> <unk> . He restored it strictly according to contemporary accounts , which resulted in an ibis or stork @-@ like bird instead of a dodo . As it was considered <unk> with the dodo , the Réunion solitaire was long believed to also be a member of the <unk> family of pigeons . 
