The Great Auk was a great swimmer but it could not fly. It even walked awkwardly and as a matter of fact, that very same word may be a derivation of its name. When three Icelanders, Jón Brandsson, ...

The great auk was hunted in the Scottish Isles, Norway, Iceland and some other places — but the major slaughterhouse of the great auks was in Newfoundland. It was European sailors, French and ...

The great auk could reach 30 inches from tip to tail and lived along the rocky shorelines of the icy North Atlantic. It looked a lot like a penguin. In fact, ...

Museums and merchants started paying top dollar for great auk eggs and skins. In 1844, members of a small expedition found two of the birds on an Icelandic island, strangled them and crushed their ...

By 1800, most great auk colonies had been wiped out; the last known pair was killed by collectors in 1844. Objects on view include: A specimen of the great auk collected in 1834 and an egg; 2 journal ...

By about 1850, the great auk was extinct; the last two known specimens were hunted down by fishermen on Eldey Island, off the coast of Iceland. The songbird obsession that became an extinction crisis.

The great auk had long provided humans with a source of meat and eggs. But from around 1500, hunting dramatically intensified when Europeans discovered the rich fishing grounds of Newfoundland.

Golden eggs, witches and life after death all feature in this extraordinary story of the great auk, a flightless bird that was hunted to extinction in 1844. From 2016. Show more.

The Great auk, John Gerrard Keulemans/Public domain/WikimediaCommons. DNA research has recently established that the stuffed bird in The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels is, in ...

Gísli Pálsson: The great auk was a tall bird — 80 centimeters [31 inches] and quite thick with lots of meat — and it was flightless so would nest on skerries [small rocky islands] where it ...