Great auk
The great auk, a flightless seabird of the North Atlantic, lost its last confirmed pair on the 3rd of June 1844. The two birds were on Eldey, a rocky island off the coast of Iceland. They were incubating an egg, so their deaths also ended the last known breeding attempt of the species. What kind of animal was this, and why did it carry a name that now belongs to other birds? How did a bird with nesting colonies scattered across the North Atlantic shrink to one pair on one rock? And why did its skins and eggs become so precious that scientists were still tracing individual specimens as late as 2025?
In the 16th century, the word penguin first appeared as another name for the great auk. It may come from the Welsh pen gwyn, meaning white head, though that origin is debated. When European explorers later met the black-and-white birds of the Southern Hemisphere, they noticed the likeness and borrowed the northern bird's name. The two groups are not closely related. Whalers added to the muddle by lumping northern and southern birds together under the name woggins.
Carl Linnaeus counted the great auk among the 4,400 animal species he formally described in his eighteenth-century work Systema Naturae. He called it Alca impennis. Alca is a Latin form of a Scandinavian word for razorbills and their relatives. The bird had reached print well before that. In 1605, Charles d'Ecluse described it as Mergus Americanus and included a woodcut, which is the oldest unambiguous picture of the species.
It was 1791 before the bird received its own genus, Pinguinus. That name travelled from Latin pinguis, meaning plump, through the Spanish, Portuguese and French names for the bird. The species name impennis points to something missing, since it refers to the lack of flight feathers, or pennae.
Peoples around the Atlantic named the bird for its shape and size. The Norse called it geirfugl, the spearbird, which gave English the alternative names garefowl and gairfowl. The Basque word arponaz means spearbill, and the Irish falcóg mhór means big auk. The Inuit called it isarukitsok, or little wing. Modern French still says grand pingouin, a reminder of which bird held the name first.
Fossils from Boxgrove in England and the Lower Town Hill Formation of Bermuda are the oldest known records of the modern great auk. Both date to the Middle Pleistocene, at least 400,000 years ago. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA has since confirmed what shape and geography had long suggested. The razorbill is the closest living relative of the great auk.
The little auk, also called the dovekie, belongs to the same close circle but followed a radically different evolutionary path. Because the great auk looked so much like the razorbill, apart from its size and flightlessness, it was often filed under the genus Alca, as Linnaeus had done. Some ornithologists still prefer that placement. The weight of evidence, however, favours a genus of its own.
A larger flightless cousin, Pinguinus alfrednewtoni, lived in the Early Pliocene. Its bones come from the Yorktown Formation at the Lee Creek Mine in North Carolina. The two species are thought to have split from a shared ancestor, probably a bird resembling a stout Xantus's murrelet. Pinguinus alfrednewtoni lived in the Western Atlantic, while the great auk lived in the Eastern Atlantic. After the former died out, the great auk took over its territory. Other flightless alcids, named Mancalla, Praemancalla and Alcodes, were not close kin.
The great auk holds one grim distinction among British birds. It is the only bird recorded there that became extinct in historic times.
Standing about 75 centimetres tall and weighing around 5 kilograms, the great auk was the largest alcid to survive into modern times. Only the prehistoric Miomancalla was bigger. Birds from the far north averaged larger than those from farther south. Both sexes looked alike, though bill and thigh-bone length hint at some difference in size.
A glossy black back and white belly gave it a tuxedo look. In summer, a wide white patch sat above each eye, which had a hazel or chestnut iris. In winter, the bird moulted and traded the patch for a white band, plus a grey line of feathers running from eye to ear. Its black bill was 11 centimetres long and curved downward at the tip. Deep white grooves marked it, up to seven on the upper half and twelve on the lower in summer.
The wings measured only 15 centimetres, and the longest flight feathers reached just 10 centimetres. These stubs could not lift the bird, but they drove it underwater. The legs sat far back on the body, which made the auk a powerful swimmer and diver. Webbed feet and countershading came from convergent evolution, the same pressure that produced the look of the southern penguins.
On land, the bird was a poor performer. It walked slowly, sometimes using its wings for balance on rough ground. When it ran, it took short, awkward steps in a straight line.
In water, the picture reversed. A great auk could bank, veer and turn beneath the surface, holding its head up with the neck drawn in. It was known to dive to 75 metres, and one claim puts its limit at a kilometre. Most dives stayed shallow to save energy. It could hold its breath for 15 minutes, longer than a seal. It could also accelerate underwater and shoot out of the sea onto a rocky ledge above.
Fish made up most of its diet, usually 12 to 20 centimetres long and weighing 40 to 50 grams. Remains found with bones on Funk Island point to Atlantic menhaden and capelin as favourites. Crustaceans, cod, sand lance, lumpsuckers and shorthorn sculpins may also have been taken. The birds fed in shallower waters than other alcids, and probably hunted together in flocks. After breeding, some were seen 500 kilometres from land. Their deep diving eased competition with other alcid species.
The bird's voice is poorly known. Recorded calls include a low croak and a hoarse scream. A captive great auk gurgled when it was anxious.
The great auk is believed to have had no more than 20 breeding colonies, ever. Its demands were strict. It needed a rocky island with a sloping shore for reaching the sea, rich feeding waters nearby, and enough distance from the mainland to discourage visits from humans and polar bears. Only seven former colony sites are known. They are Papa Westray in the Orkney Islands, St Kilda, Grimsey Island, Eldey Island, Geirfuglasker near Iceland, Funk Island near Newfoundland, and the Bird Rocks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Funk Island was the largest. Records hint that Cape Cod may also have hosted nesters.
The bird came ashore only to breed and otherwise roosted on the sea. Its winter range stretched much farther. In recorded history it rarely went south of Massachusetts Bay, and it was particularly common on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Bones turn up much farther afield. A bone from Madeira and another from the Neolithic site of El Harhoura 2 in Morocco are the southernmost eastern records. Florida has yielded bones too, though some may have arrived through trade. Pleistocene fossils place the species in southern France and Italy. Winter travellers moved in pairs or small groups, never as a whole colony.
In early and mid-May, pairs began to form. Accounts of their breeding are somewhat unreliable, but the birds are thought to have mated for life. Partners performed a social display, bobbing their heads and showing off the white eye patch, the bill markings and the yellow mouth. Some estimates suggest one nesting bird for every square metre of ground. Where other alcids shared a colony, the larger great auks dominated.
Each female laid a single egg between late May and early June, with a replacement possible if it was lost. In years of food shortage, the birds skipped breeding altogether. The egg lay on bare ground up to 100 metres from shore. It averaged 12.4 centimetres long and 7.6 centimetres across, with spots and lines in black, brown or grey on a yellowish white to light ochre shell. The markings often bunched at the large end, and may have helped parents pick out their own egg in the throng.
The pair incubated the egg upright for 39 to 44 days, swapping turns. Parents also took turns feeding the chick, which wore grey down. Within two or three weeks, usually around the middle of July, it was ready to leave the nest for the water. Adults were seen swimming with young birds riding on their backs. Sexual maturity arrived between the ages of four and seven, and a life span of 20 to 25 years is believed.
Neanderthals were eating great auks more than 100,000 years ago, and they left well-cleaned bones beside their campfires. Images believed to show the bird were carved into the walls of El Pendo Cave in Camargo, Spain, and at Paglicci in Italy, over 35,000 years ago. Paintings about 20,000 years old in France's Grotte Cosquer may show it too.
At the Maritime Archaic site of Port au Choix in Newfoundland, a person buried around 2000 BC lay among more than 200 great auk beaks. These are presumed to be the remains of a suit made from the birds' skins, with the heads left on as decoration. Nearly half of the bird bones in graves at that site came from great auks. Native peoples also valued the bird for winter food and wore its image in bone necklaces. The extinct Beothuks of Newfoundland made a pudding from the eggs. The Dorset Eskimos hunted the bird, and the Saqqaq in Greenland overhunted it, shrinking its range locally.
European sailors found a use of their own. The presence of great auks told them that the Grand Banks of Newfoundland were close. Hunting for food, eggs and down went on at significant scale from at least the eighth century. The species is estimated to have peaked in the millions.
Jacques Cartier and the crews of ships seeking gold on Baffin Island carried too little food for the voyage home. They used great auks as meals and as fishing bait. Reportedly, later vessels anchored beside a colony and ran planks to shore, then herded hundreds of birds aboard to be slaughtered. Some authors doubt that this method worked. Eggs were prized too, being three times the size of a murre's, with a large yolk. Rats that came ashore with the sailors raided nests.
By the mid-16th century, nearly every nesting colony on the European side had been wiped out by hunters seeking down for pillows. The Little Ice Age may have helped, by exposing more breeding islands to polar bears. Recent evidence, however, points to human exploitation for down as the primary driver of extinction. On the American side, eider down was preferred until eiders were nearly exterminated in the 1770s. Down collectors then turned to the great auk.
Protection arrived early but did little. The first official protection came in 1553. A 1775 law in St. John's threatened floggings for anyone hunting the birds for feathers or eggs, though hunting for fishing bait stayed legal. In 1794, Great Britain banned killing the species for its feathers. That same year, a visitor aboard HMS Boston recorded what the trade on Funk Island looked like.
Aaron Thomas of HMS Boston wrote in 1794 that feather hunters on Funk Island did not bother killing their quarry. They seized a bird and plucked its best feathers, then, in his words, "turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leasure." He added that cooking fires were fed by the birds' own oily bodies, because "there is no wood on the island." By 1800, the great auk had vanished from Funk Island.
Rarity made the bird a trophy. Rich Europeans and museums wanted skins and eggs, and the loss of eggs to collectors helped doom the species. Eggers worked out that the birds did not all lay on the same day, so they could return to a colony more than once. They took only eggs without embryos and tended to throw away those with a chick growing inside.
The last colony lived on Geirfuglasker, which means Great Auk Rock, off Iceland. This volcanic rock was ringed by cliffs that kept humans away. In 1830, it sank after a volcanic eruption, and the birds moved to nearby Eldey. That island could be climbed from a single side. When people discovered the colony in 1835, nearly fifty birds were present, and museums soon began collecting them.
In July 1840, on the islet of Stac an Armin in St Kilda, Scotland, three men caught a single bird they called a garefowl. They noticed its little wings and the big white spot on its head. They tied it up and kept it alive for three days, until a large storm blew in. Believing the bird was a witch causing the weather, they beat it to death with a stick. It was the last great auk seen in Britain.
The pair on Eldey died at the request of a merchant who wanted specimens. The killers were Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson, and the specialist John Wolley later interviewed them. Sigurður recalled that the birds "walked slowly" and that one "walked like a man... but moved its feet quickly." Of his own bird he said: "He made no cry. I strangled him."
A live bird reported on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in 1852 has been accepted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Alleged sightings went on for decades, with the last claimed in the Lofotens in 1927. Errol Fuller noted that several later sightings were hoaxes or mistaken penguins that had been released near Norway. Today there is ongoing, controversial discussion about reviving the species with DNA from preserved specimens.
Seventy-eight skins of the great auk survive, mostly in museum collections, along with about 75 eggs and 24 complete skeletons. All but four of the skins show summer plumage, and only two come from immature birds. Specialists have given every egg and skin its own number. Thousands of loose bones were collected from Funk Island, but only a few full skeletons exist. Natural mummies are known from there as well.
The eyes and internal organs of the last two birds from 1844 are kept in the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen. For more than 180 years, nobody knew where their skins had gone. Researchers extracted DNA from the organs and compared it with candidate skins suggested by Errol Fuller, held in museums across Europe and the United States. In 2017, the male's organs matched a skin in the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. In 2025, the female's organs matched a skin in the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science, which settled the mystery.
After the extinction, the remains soared in value. Auctions drew intense interest in Victorian Britain, which now holds 15 specimens, more than any other country. In 1971, the Icelandic Museum of National History paid £9000 for one, and the Guinness Book of Records listed it as the most expensive stuffed bird ever sold. Eggs sometimes fetched up to 11 times a skilled worker's yearly earnings. Six eggs are lost without a trace, and others were accidentally destroyed. A mounted skin burned in Lisbon in 1978 at the Museu Bocage, and another was destroyed in the Mainz Museum during World War II. Replica skins and eggs were sold to collectors in the 1920s.
The bird also took flight in fiction. In Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies, published in 1863, the last great auk, called a gairfowl, tells how her species met its end. Enid Blyton's The Island of Adventure, from 1944, sends a character searching for a lost colony. Anatole France's 1908 satire Penguin Island follows a great auk population baptized by a nearsighted missionary. Farley Mowat opened his 1984 book Sea of Slaughter with a section titled "Spearbill", and Elizabeth Kolbert gave the bird a chapter in her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2014 book The Sixth Extinction. Painter Walton Ford depicted it in The Witch of St. Kilda and Funk Island, and Cuba put it on a stamp in 1974.
The American Ornithological Society's scientific journal carried the bird's name, The Auk, until 2021, when it became Ornithology.
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Common questions
What was the great auk?
The great auk (Pinguinus impennis) was a flightless seabird of the North Atlantic, also called the garefowl. It stood about 75 centimetres tall, weighed about 5 kilograms, and was the largest alcid to survive into modern times.
When did the great auk go extinct?
The last two confirmed great auks were killed on Eldey, off Iceland, on the 3rd of June 1844. A bird reported on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in 1852 has been accepted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.
Why did the great auk go extinct?
Human exploitation was the primary cause, especially hunting for down, which wiped out most European colonies by the mid-16th century. Collectors later hunted the remaining birds and took their eggs for museums and private collections.
Is the great auk related to penguins?
No, the great auk is not closely related to the penguins of the Southern Hemisphere. Explorers named those birds penguins because they resembled the great auk, whose closest living relative is the razorbill.
Where did the great auk live?
The great auk lived in the cold North Atlantic, with colonies on rocky islands such as Funk Island, Eldey, St Kilda and Papa Westray. Funk Island, near Newfoundland, was the largest known breeding colony.
How many great auk specimens still exist?
About 78 skins, roughly 75 eggs and 24 complete skeletons survive, mostly in museums. In 2025, DNA matched the last female's organs to a skin in the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science.
Why was the great auk called a penguin?
The word penguin first appeared in the 16th century as a name for the great auk, possibly from the Welsh pen gwyn, meaning white head. The name was later transferred to the Southern Hemisphere birds.
All sources
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