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The "Great Auk, Northern Penguin, or Gair-Fowl", wood engraving by Thomas Bewick in A History of British Birds, 1804 [a] The great auk was one of the 4,400 animal species formally described by Carl Linnaeus in his eighteenth-century work Systema Naturae, in which it was given the binomial Alca impennis. [15]
Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis) The Great Auk, a flightless bird, was hunted to total extinction by 1844. Over-hunted for their feathers, meat, and oil, their population plummeted for decades and ...
A taxidermized Great Auk The great auk (or, as it has been nicknamed, the “Penguin of the North”) was a flightless marine bird that inhabited the North Atlantic Ocean and its nearby islands. Its range once extended to the continental United States and Europe. [ 21 ]
Auks are superficially similar to penguins, having black-and-white colours, upright posture, and some of their habits. Nevertheless, they are not closely related to penguins, but rather are believed to be an example of moderate convergent evolution. Auks are monomorphic (males and females are similar in appearance).
The specific epithet aalge is an old Danish word for an auk. [6] The auks are a family of seabirds related to the gulls and terns which contains several genera. The common murre is placed in the guillemot (murre) genus Uria (Brisson, 1760), which it shares with the thick-billed murre or Brunnich's guillemot, U. lomvia.
Even though they live in large colonies, emperor penguins are the least common Antarctic penguins. Scientists estimate anywhere from 265,000 to 278,000 breeding pairs are left in the wild.
A great auk, also originally called a Pinguinus impennis, which modern penguins were named after for their similarity. [10] The word penguin first appears in literature at the end of the 16th century as a synonym for the great auk. [11]
The great auk was a large flightless bird that lived in the Northern Hemisphere. It had a large, intricately grooved beak. When the first settlers arrived in Iceland, the auk population was probably in the millions. However, the settlers found the auks to be “very good and nourishing meat.”