Great auk

of the Early Pliocene relative Pinguinus alfrednewtoni Analysis of mtDNA sequences has confirmed morphological and biogeographical studies suggesting that the razorbill is the closest living relative of the great auk. The great auk also was related closely to the little auk or dovekie, which underwent a radically different evolution compared to Pinguinus. Due to its outward similarity to the razorbill (apart from flightlessness and size), the great auk often was placed in the genus Alca, following Linnaeus. The oldest known fossil records of the modern great auk are from the Boxgrove Palaeolithic site of England and Lower Town Hill Formation of Bermuda, both of which are dated to the Middle Pleistocene at least 400,000 years BP. The Pliocene sister species, Pinguinus alfrednewtoni, and molecular evidence show that the three closely related genera diverged soon after their common ancestor, a bird probably similar to a stout Xantus's murrelet, had spread to the coasts of the Atlantic. Apparently, by that time, the murres, or Atlantic guillemots, already had split from the other Atlantic alcids. Razorbill-like birds were common in the Atlantic during the Pliocene, but the evolution of the little auk is sparsely documented. , Naturalis Biodiversity Center The following cladogram shows the placement of the great auk among its closest relatives, based on a 2004 genetic study: }} Pinguinus alfrednewtoni was a larger, and also flightless, member of the genus Pinguinus that lived during the Early Pliocene. Known from bones found in the Yorktown Formation of the Lee Creek Mine in North Carolina, it is believed to have split, along with the great auk, from a common ancestor. Pinguinus alfrednewtoni lived in the Western Atlantic, while the great auk lived in the Eastern Atlantic. After the former died out following the Pliocene, the great auk took over its territory. The name Alca is a Latin derivative of the Scandinavian word for razorbills and their relatives. The species was not placed in its own scientific genus, Pinguinus, until 1791. The Irish name for the great auk is , meaning "big seabird/auk". The Basque name is '', meaning "spearbill". Its early French name was apponatz, while modern French uses . The Norse called the great auk geirfugl, which means "spearbird". This has led to an alternative English common name for the bird, garefowl or gairfowl. The Inuit name for the great auk was isarukitsok, which meant "little wing". It may be derived from the Welsh pen gwyn'' "white head", although the etymology is debated. When European explorers discovered what today are known as penguins in the Southern Hemisphere, they noticed their similar appearance to the great auk and named them after this bird, although biologically, they are not closely related. Whalers also lumped the northern and southern birds together under the common name "woggins". ==Description==

Standing about tall and weighing approximately as adult birds, the flightless great auk was the second-largest member of both its family and the order Charadriiformes overall, surpassed only by the mancalline Miomancalla. It is, however, the largest species to survive into modern times. The great auks that lived farther north averaged larger in size than the more southerly members of the species. Males and females were similar in plumage, although there is evidence for differences in size, particularly in the bill and femur length. During winter the great auk moulted and lost this eye patch, which was replaced with a wide white band and a grey line of feathers that stretched from the eye to the ear. The bill was large at long and curved downward at the top; The legs were far back on the bird's body, which gave it powerful swimming and diving abilities. ==Distribution and habitat==

, St. Kilda, Scotland, one locality where the great auk used to breed The great auk was found in the cold North Atlantic coastal waters along the coasts of Canada, the Northeastern United States, Norway, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Great Britain, Ireland, France, and the Iberian Peninsula. It has been suggested that some of the bones discovered in Florida may be the result of aboriginal trading. and another from the Neolithic site of El Harhoura 2 in Morocco. in the Orkney Islands, St. Kilda off Scotland, Grimsey Island, Eldey Island, Geirfuglasker near Iceland, Funk Island near Newfoundland, and the Bird Rocks (Rochers-aux-Oiseaux) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Records suggest that this species may have bred on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. After the chicks fledged, the great auk migrated north and south away from the breeding colonies and they tended to go southward during late autumn and winter. ==Ecology and behaviour==

, from The Birds of America (1827–1838) The great auk was never observed and described by modern scientists during its existence and is only known from the accounts of laymen, such as sailors, so its behaviour is not well known and difficult to reconstruct. Much may be inferred from its close, living relative, the razorbill, as well as from remaining soft tissue. When they did run, it was awkwardly and with short steps in a straight line. Polar bears preyed on nesting colonies of the great auk. although after the breeding season, they had been sighted as far as from land. Other fish suggested as potential prey include lumpsuckers, shorthorn sculpins, cod, sand lance, as well as crustaceans. Great Auks began pairing in early and mid-May. They are believed to have mated for life (although some theorize that great auks could have mated outside their pair, a trait seen in the razorbill). It is believed that the variation in the egg streaks enabled the parents to recognize their egg among those in the vast colony. ==Relationship with humans==

(1) and two tibiae (2), bones of the great auk uncovered by archaeologists in an ancient kitchen midden in Caithness The great auk was a food source for Neanderthals more than 100,000 years ago, as evidenced by well-cleaned bones found by their campfires. Images believed to depict the great auk also were carved into the walls of the El Pendo Cave in Camargo, Spain, and Paglicci, Italy, more than 35,000 years ago, Nearly half of the bird bones found in graves at this site were of the great auk, suggesting that it had great cultural significance for the Maritime Archaic people. as well as from early 5th century Labrador, where the bird seems to have occurred only as stragglers. Early explorers, including Jacques Cartier, and numerous ships attempting to find gold on Baffin Island were not provisioned with food for the journey home, and therefore, used great auks as both a convenient food source and bait for fishing. Reportedly, some of the later vessels anchored next to a colony and ran out planks to the land. The sailors then herded hundreds of great auks onto the ships, where they were slaughtered. Great auk eggs were also a valued food source, as the eggs were three times the size of a murre's and had a large yolk. Three men from St. Kilda caught a single "garefowl", noticing its little wings and the large white spot on its head. They tied it up and kept it alive for three days, until a large storm arose. Believing that the bird was a witch and was causing the storm, they then killed it by beating it with a stick. , one of the two last birds killed on Eldey in 1844 The last colony of great auks lived on Geirfuglasker (the "Great Auk Rock") off Iceland. This islet was a volcanic rock surrounded by cliffs that made it inaccessible to humans, but in 1830, the islet submerged after a volcanic eruption, and the birds moved to the nearby island of Eldey, which was accessible from a single side. When the colony was discovered in 1835, nearly fifty birds were present. Museums, desiring the skins of the great auk for preservation and display, quickly began collecting birds from the colony. Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson, the men who had killed the last birds, were interviewed by great auk specialist John Wolley, and Sigurður described the act as follows: A later claim of a live individual sighted in 1852 on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland has been accepted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Preserved specimens Today, 78 skins of the great auk remain, mostly in museum collections, along with approximately 75 eggs and 24 complete skeletons. All but four of the surviving skins are in summer plumage, and only two of these are immature. No hatchling specimens exist. Each egg and skin has been assigned a number by specialists. Natural mummies also are known from Funk Island, and the eyes and internal organs of the last two birds from 1844 are stored in the Zoological Museum, Copenhagen. The whereabouts of the skins from the last two individuals has been unknown for over 180 years, but that mystery has been fully resolved using DNA extracted from the organs of the last individuals and the skins of the candidate specimens suggested by Errol Fuller In 2025, a positive match was found between the female organs and the skin in the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and Science, confirming that the specimen was indeed that of the last female. Following the bird's extinction, remains of the great auk increased dramatically in value, and auctions of specimens created intense interest in Victorian Britain, where 15 specimens are now located, the largest number of any country. The price of its eggs sometimes reached up to 11 times the amount earned by a skilled worker in a year. Different illustrations of the auk are included in the original 1863 version, the 1889 version illustrated by Linley Sambourne, 1916 by Frank A. Nankivell, and 1916 by Jessie Willcox Smith. Enid Blyton's The Island of Adventure (1944) sends one of the protagonists on a failed search for what he believes is a lost colony of the species. Literature and journalism In the short story The Harbor-Master by Robert W. Chambers, the discovery and attempted recovery of the last known pair of great auks is central to the plot (which also involves a proto-Lovecraftian element of suspense). The story first appeared in ''Ainslee's Magazine'' (August 1898) and was slightly revised to become the first five chapters of Chambers' episodic novel In Search of the Unknown, (Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York, 1904). Penguin Island, a 1908 French satirical novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Anatole France, narrates the fictional history of a great auk population that is mistakenly baptized by a nearsighted missionary. In his novel Ulysses (1922), James Joyce mentions the bird while the novel's main character is drifting into sleep. He associates the great auk with the mythical roc as a method of formally returning the main character to a sleepy land of fantasy and memory. W. S. Merwin mentions the great auk in a short litany of extinct animals in his poem "For a Coming Extinction", one of the poems from his 1967 collection, "The Lice". Night of the Auk, a 1956 Broadway drama by Arch Oboler, depicts a group of astronauts returning from the Moon to discover that a full-blown nuclear war has broken out. Obeler draws a parallel between the anthropogenic extinction of the great auk and of the story's nuclear extinction of humankind. Ben Shattuck's 2024 collection of fictional short stories, The History of Sound, includes two stories centered around the great auk, its extinction, and its potential reemergence: "Radiolab: 'Singularities'" and "The Auk". A great auk is collected by fictional naturalist Stephen Maturin in the Patrick O'Brian historical novel ''The Surgeon's Mate'' (1980). This work also details the harvesting of a colony of auks. Farley Mowat devotes the first section, "Spearbill", of his book Sea of Slaughter (1984) to the history of the great auk. Elizabeth Kolbert's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), includes a chapter on the great auk. Eoghan Walls book Field Notes from an Extinction tells the story of an ornithologist studying a flock of great auks on Tor Mor, an uninhabited outcrop off the island of Inishtrahul, off the coast of Ireland. File:Geirfugl (great auk) monument.jpg|Monument on Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland File:Awk Walk (42820792915).jpg|Monument on Fogo Island, Canada File:Fowl Craig, Papa Westray.jpg|Monument to the last British great auk at Fowl Craig, Orkney Performing arts The great auk is the subject of a ballet, Still Life at the Penguin Café (1988), and a song, "A Dream Too Far", in the ecological musical ''Rockford's Rock Opera'' (2010). Mascots The great auk is the mascot of the Archmere Academy in Claymont, Delaware, and the Adelaide University Choral Society (AUCS) in Australia. The great auk was formerly the mascot of the Lindsay Frost campus of Sir Sandford Fleming College in Ontario. In 2012, the two separate sports programs of Fleming College were combined and the great auk mascot went extinct. The Lindsay Frost campus student owned bar, student centre, and lounge is still known as the Auk's Lodge. It was also the mascot of the now ended Knowledge Masters educational competition. Names The scientific journal of the American Ornithologists' Union, Ornithology, was named The Auk until 2021 in honour of this bird. A cigarette company, the British Great Auk Cigarettes, was named after this bird. Replica skins and eggs were made and sold in the 1920s for collectors. The English painter and writer Errol Fuller produced Last Stand for his monograph on the species. ==See also==