Which island did the dodo call home?

Mauritius, and the dodo is the emblem of extinction largely because it was so fast - Europeans arrived around 1598 and it was gone by about 1690, within a single human lifetime.

It was not killed mainly by being eaten, and sailors' accounts generally say it tasted poor. What did it were the animals that came ashore with them: pigs, rats, monkeys and cats, eating eggs and chicks of a ground-nesting bird that had evolved with no mammalian predators and no instinct to protect against them. Habitat clearance finished it.

The most galling part is how little was kept. There is no complete stuffed dodo anywhere in the world - the last surviving specimen, at the Ashmolean in Oxford, was reportedly burned in 1755 with only the head and a foot saved, and contemporary paintings may be based on overfed captive birds, which is why depictions are probably too fat. A species that a museum had in its hands was allowed to rot, and everything since has been reconstructed from bones found in a swamp.