A startling number of birds have become extinct over the last 400 to 500 years. Perhaps the most famous is the dodo was a flightless bird that was found on island in the Indian ocean. The moa lived in New Zeland and looked like an ostrich. Gradually, it grew too heavy to fly. Thus, it became easy prey for hunters. The last specimens had been killed by the eighteenth century. The passenger pigeon became extinct as lats as 1914 when the last surviving bird died in an Ohio zoo.