Which bird was hunted to extinction within about 80 years of its first European description?

The dodo, on Mauritius, first described in 1598 and gone by around 1680. Sailors ate some, but the decisive damage was done by the pigs, rats, cats and macaques they landed, which ate eggs laid on the ground by a bird that had evolved with no ground predators at all.

There is no complete specimen anywhere in the world. The last stuffed dodo, in Oxford, was reportedly burned as decayed in 1755 with only the head and a foot saved, and the rest of what survives is bones from a marsh. That is why every familiar picture derives from a handful of seventeenth-century paintings, most made from captive birds in Europe that were probably overfed - the dodo was likely a good deal slimmer and more upright than the fat comic figure everyone knows.

It was also not stupid. The name may come from a Dutch or Portuguese word for simpleton, and the reputation follows from the name rather than from evidence; a 2016 study of its braincase found a brain proportionate to its body, with an unusually large olfactory bulb. Being unafraid of a species you have never met is not a defect of intelligence. Its closest living relative is the Nicobar pigeon.