Ustad Mansur was a seventeenth-century Indian painter and naturalist who served as a Mughal court artist. During which period he excelled at depicting plants and animals. He was the earliest artist to depict the dodo in colour, apart from being the first to illustrate the Siberian crane. Towards the end of Akbar's reign, he gained the title of ustad (master) and during the reign of Mughal Emperor Jahangir his masterpieces earned him the title of Nãdir-al-’Asr. Although he was largely known for his natural history illustrations, he also portrayed people in various manuscript illustrations.

The dodo is an extinct flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Mauritius, which is east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The dodo's closest relative was the also-extinct and flightless Rodrigues solitaire. The two formed the subfamily Raphinae, a clade of extinct flightless birds that were a part of the family which includes pigeons and doves. The closest living relative of the dodo is the Nicobar pigeon. A white dodo was once thought to have existed on the nearby island of Réunion, but it is now believed that this assumption was merely confusion based on the also-extinct Réunion ibis and paintings of white dodos.