Birds
Great Auk
Pinguinus impennis · also called garefowl, the original penguin
Before the word meant a southern bird, a penguin was a great auk — a big, flightless, black-and-white diver of the North Atlantic that stood upright on rocky islands and swam with its stubby wings. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was gone, and the date of its end is known almost exactly: 3 June 1844.
Overview
Pinguinus impennis stood about 75 to 85 cm tall and weighed roughly 5 kg. It was black above and white below, with a heavy hooked bill grooved with white lines and a white patch in front of each eye. Its wings were too small for flight but drove it powerfully underwater, where it chased small shoaling fish. It bred on a few low rocky islands in the North Atlantic and spent the rest of the year at sea.
The original penguin
European sailors used the name penguin for this bird long before they reached the Southern Hemisphere. When they later met the unrelated flightless divers of the far south, they gave them the same name for the resemblance. Those birds kept it; the great auk, the first penguin, did not survive to share it.
Hunted to nothing
The great auk laid one egg a year and could not flee. For centuries it was taken for meat, fat, and bait, and from the 1500s crews on Funk Island killed birds by the thousand for their feathers, herding them into stone pens. As it grew rare, museums and collectors drove up the price of skins and eggs, and hunters took the last birds — a pair on Eldey, Iceland, strangled while incubating their egg.
Status
The great auk is Extinct. The last confirmed record is 1844, with a single unconfirmed sighting in 1852. About 78 skins and 75 eggs survive in museums, and the bird is a recurring name in discussions of de-extinction.
Great Auk: common questions
Was the great auk a penguin?
No, though it is the reason the word penguin exists. The great auk was an auk, in the same family as puffins, guillemots, and razorbills, and it lived only in the North Atlantic. European sailors and naturalists called it the penguin for centuries. When explorers reached the far Southern Hemisphere and found large flightless seabirds that swam with their wings and stood upright on land, they saw the resemblance and called those birds penguins too. The southern birds kept the name and became famous; the great auk, the original penguin, went extinct. The two groups are not closely related and their similarity is a case of convergent evolution.
Why did the great auk go extinct?
It was killed faster than it could breed. The great auk nested in just a few dense colonies on low islands, could not fly away from danger, and laid only one egg a year. For centuries sailors and settlers harvested it for meat, oil, and fishing bait, and from the sixteenth century the killing became systematic, with crews slaughtering birds by the thousand on Funk Island for their feathers. By the early nineteenth century only a remnant survived in Iceland. At that point the rarity itself became fatal, as museums and wealthy collectors paid high prices for skins and eggs, driving hunters to take the very last birds.
When and where was the last great auk seen?
The last confirmed great auks were a breeding pair on the small Icelandic island of Eldey, killed on 3 June 1844 by a party of fishermen collecting specimens for a dealer. Two of the men strangled the adults and a third broke the single egg. There was a later, unconfirmed report of a live bird seen on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland in 1852, which is sometimes cited as the true last record, but it cannot be verified. After that there are no credible sightings, and the great auk is one of the few extinctions whose final moment is recorded almost to the day.
What remains of the great auk today?
Around 78 mounted skins, about 75 eggs, and a scattering of skeletons and isolated bones are held in museums and a few private collections around the world, along with preserved internal organs from the Eldey birds in Copenhagen. No soft tissue was frozen and no full genome existed until researchers sequenced DNA from museum remains. Those specimens are now extremely valuable and are studied for what they reveal about the bird's biology and its decline. The great auk also appears frequently in discussions of species that might one day be candidates for de-extinction.