"No other species has such a documentation of its ending."

September 3, 2024 2:00 PM

The last Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis) died about 180 years ago, driven to extinction by hunting, but not before giving one of its names to an unrelated bird in the Antarctic. This year, The Last of Its Kind, a book by Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson, argues that the idea of human-caused extinction was conceived in response to the loss of the Great Auk. He was interviewed by Sonya Buting for the CBC. The book was reviewed at length by Liam Shaw in the LRB, who was interviewed about the bird and book by Thomas Jones on the LRB Podcast.
posted by Kattullus (9 comments total)

Incidentally, "The False Penguin of the South" is a username begging to be claimed.
posted by Kattullus at 2:01 PM on September 3 [5 favorites]

When I was a child, my parents took me to the British Museum of Natural History. I was on an extinction kick then, and I asked if I could see the last of the Great Auks (stuffed and in storage). It wasn't on display, but one of the curators was so moved by the unique request that we got to go back to the storage rooms to see the Auk.

Anyways, it was a big stuffed bird. I wish I could remember the excursion in greater detail, but I was only six at the time. I was always a weird nerd of a child, I suppose.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 2:31 PM on September 3 [12 favorites]

🐧
posted by HearHere at 3:06 PM on September 3

the death of the very last mating pair and their egg is one of the saddest and most infuriating stories i've ever heard

would love to walk down to the beach and see a bunch of these big proud bastards still walking around. poor things
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:10 PM on September 3 [6 favorites]

‘genuinely awkward’ *sigh*
posted by HearHere at 3:16 PM on September 3

Perhaps someday genetic technologies will make it possible to replicate enough of them to reintroduce them into the wild.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 3:52 PM on September 3

My Alma Mater Trinity College Dublin acquired the last GtAuk killed [in 1834] in Irish Waters at about the same time the species was declared extinct. It is on display in the Zoology Museum and I went to visit 2x a year in the late 00s taking groups of teenagers interested in science. It was pretty casual in the museum. Propped in the corner were a pair of narwhal tusks. A few years later, person or persons unknown walked into the museum at lunchtime and made off with the tusks. I guess the perps were really tall to be able to put a tusk down their trouser legs and still walk [. . . funny].
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:07 AM on September 4 [1 favorite]

Lord Debling must be crushed..
posted by MiraK at 4:41 AM on September 4

.
posted by TheFalsePenguinOfTheSouth at 11:58 AM on September 4 [2 favorites]