While reading through the Feb 22 issue of _Science_ (the same issue that mentions the dinosaur "listserv" in the _Syntarsus_/_Megapnosaurus_ fiasco) I came across this article:
Shapiro et al. (2002). Flight of the Dodo. Nature 295: 1683.
It's actually Science, not Nature, as noted above
THey believe the dodo island-hopped because the ridge on which the islands sit is considerably older than the islands themselves. Rodrigues is thought to have reached the surface only about 1.5 million years ago, and the solitaire's ancestors must have flown there, but 1.5 million years is enough time to lose flight.The use of mitochondrial sequences in building phylogenies is close to home for me, and I have a few queries on this paper that I'll spare the list by not mentioning. However, the molecular clock data is interesting, since it suggests a divergence time (25.6 Ma - Oligocene) between the dodo and solitaire that is actually older than the estimated creation of the islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues (6.8 - 7.8 Ma) based on geological data.