Dodo, a large flightless bird that no longer exists, wasn’t as dumb as it was thought earlier. The bird was smart and had a better sense of smell than most of the bird species, according to a new study.

Researchers announced Wednesday that they examined skull of a dodo bird. They took the skull from a museum collection and studied the bird’s brain size and shape. According to researchers, they noticed that the dodo’s brain was not as small as it was thought. It was completely in proportion to the bird’s body size, they added.

The dodo bird was endemic to the island of Mauritius. The ground-nesting bird was unable to fly. With a pointed beak and rounded head, dodo was about 3 feet tall and weighed up to about 50 pounds. It had gone extinct by about 1662, less than a century after Mauritius became a destination for humans. Human hunting is considered as a major reason behind the bird’s extinction.

The researchers said dodos had a sense of smell with an enlarged olfactory region of the brain. It was a trait that made the bird stand apart from other birds and sniff out food sources, they explained.

The study suggested that the bird should not be considered as a stupid species as it was as smart as modern pigeons. “If we take brain size as a proxy for intelligence, then the dodo was as smart as a common pigeon. Common pigeons are actually smarter than they get credit for, as they were trained as message carriers during the world wars”, said Eugenia Gold, a paleontologist at Stony Brook University in New York. Today, the bird’s name is considered as a synonym of stupidity.