The last confirmed sighting of a dodo was in 1662 — just as Louis XIV was beginning to rebuild Versailles.
The event
More amazing facts
- 1613 · 1627 The last aurochs, the wild ancestor of cattle, died in a Polish forest in 1627 — 14 years after Michael Romanov was elected tsar.
- 1613 · 1618 Five years after the Romanovs came to power (1613), the Thirty Years' War broke out in Europe.
- 1682 · 1683 Peter I became tsar in 1682; a year later the Ottomans were stopped at the gates of Vienna.
- 1687 · 1703 In the year St Petersburg was founded (1703), Newton became President of the Royal Society.
- 1689 The authoritative text of the first Russia–China treaty, Nerchinsk (1689), was in Latin: Jesuit interpreters handled the talks.
- 1709 The brutal winter of 1709, the 'Great Frost', struck all of Europe and wore down Charles XII's Swedish army before Poltava.