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THE dodo’s closest living relative turns out to be the ground-dwelling Nicobar pigeon of South-East Asia. The extinct bird’s odd appearance has given biologists few clues to its evolutionary origins. Now Alan Cooper and his colleagues from Oxford University have compared dodo DNA with DNA from the extinct flightless solitaire and from 35 living pigeon species. They found that the ancestors of the dodo and solitaire diverged from other pigeons around 42 million years ago (Science, vol 295, p 1683). They then flew across the Indian Ocean, and started to diverge from each other around 26 million years ago, about the time the island chain containing…