28/03/2024
Totally fascinating, especially the fact that penguins as we know and love today weren't actually the first birds to be called penguins!
Penguins don’t live in the Northern Hemisphere. Whoever has a little knowledge about animals knows it.
Most of their fossils have been found in Antarctica, New Zealand, Australia and South America; and a single extant species, the Galapagos penguin, can be found above the Equator. Which means a few miles above it, actually.
No polar bear has ever met a penguin in the wild, to be clear, except perhaps for the few individuals that were brought to the Arctic between the 1930s and the 1940s in a failed introduction attempt.
Nevertheless, if we just travelled back in time to before the early 1800s and if we were sailing along the coasts of the North Atlantic in the right places and at the right time, we’d see crowds of large, flightless birds on the shores, looking at us with their small brown inquisitive eyes while standing upright in their black and white suit.
And if we’d question any hypothetical English-speaking cruising companion about the identity of those familiar-looking creatures, they would respond with the utmost indifference that they are… well, penguins.
What, then, were these mysterious birds?
They were, in fact, the first creatures to be called penguins; a word whose etymology is still debated, although some trace its origins to the Welsh expression pen gwyn, literally “white head”, either from the flashy white spot adult individuals exhibited on both sides of their head, or from the White Head Island in the Bay of Fundy, where these animals used to gather in great numbers.
But they weren’t closely related to those flightless birds of the Southern Hemisphere we call “penguins” today, despite looking very similar at first glance.
Pinguinus impennis (“penguin without flight feathers”), how the species was scientifically namd by Bonnaterre in 1791, was actually a large flightless auk, which means it was a relative of puffins, guillemots and especially razorbills, to which it bore such a striking resemblance (apart for its size and flightlessness) that Linnaeus had classified it in the same genus Alca 33 years before – a choice a minority of modern ornithologists still support.
Today we prefer to call this bird “great auk” for not confusing it with the 20 or more species of penguins in the order Sphenisciformes, whose lineage dates back to the Early Paleocene or even the Late Cretaceous (see TTD post on 5 March 2023 for infos on fossil penguins).
Sphenisciforms are only distantly related to auks (Alcidae), whose oldest fossil remains are almost 30 million years younger; the physical resemblance between the two taxa is just a wonderful example of convergent evolution.
This resemblance was noted by the first explorers and sailors who ventured into the southern seas and so the vernacular name “penguin” was transferred from the northern bird to its doppelgangers on the other side of the world.
The name “woggins” used by whalers was also indifferently applied to the northern and southern birds.
The great auk was a pretty large bird, about 80 cm tall and weighing up to 5 kg; its size was therefore similar to that of the Gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua). An even larger flightless auk, Miomancalla, existed during the Miocene in North America, and it was never met by humans.
The great auk, instead, was apparently hunted by our species since prehistoric times.
Orcas, white-tailed eagles and polar bears preyed on it (so yes, in a certain sense polar bears have lived alongisde the “penguins” once), but their main predator was – guess who? Homo sapiens.
During the Pleistocene, this bird inhabited the coasts of the Mediterranean sea, with fossil remains having been found as far south as Southern Italy; in historical times it was still abundant on the coasts from the Baffin Bay to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in North America, as well as in Iceland, Norway and the British Isles.
Great auks, also known as garefowl, lived in open sea most of the year, even sleeping on the sea surface, and spent long time on land only during the breeding season.
They had pretty strict requirements for their nesting sites: due to their flightlessness, they couldn’t nest on high cliffs as other seabirds usually do, which limited the choice to relatively few localities. The hatchlings grew up very quickly, apparently fledging at about 20 days old.
When on land, these birds showed little or no fear of humans; this, along with their flightlessness, made them very vulnerable. They were hunted as a food source by both early Europeans and native Americans; their huge number probably encouraged overhunting.
In more recent times, Europeans hunted them on large scale also for down feathers, and oil obtained from their fat.
By the late 1700s, the nesting colonies were reduced to five or six localities. News about their numbers dramatically decreasing spread among egg collectors, so that their eggs became highly prized and eggers started raiding the remaining colonies to pick up eggs, in fact contributing to the decrease.
The last stronghold of the species seems to have been the tiny rocky island of Eldey, southwestern Iceland, were about 50 birds were still breeding about 1835.
However, when two Icelandic hunters landed on the island nine years later in 1844, in search of specimens for a merchant, they found a single breeding pair. They killed both birds, definitively wiping out of the planet this extraordinary species.
Now 78 stuffed specimens, 75 eggs and 24 complete skeletons, plus a number of isolated bones, remain in museum collections all over the world, to testify the existence of the only “penguin” who could live alongside the polar bears, but couldn’t survive us humans.
The picture shows the skeletal, the muscle anatomy and a real-life reconstruction of the species Pinguinus impennis; a pigeon is shown for size comparison.
Monochrome details show two men raiding a colony and killing the birds for food, feathers and oil (top) and a comparison between Pygoscelis papua or the Gentoo penguin (on the left), and Pinguinus impennis, here shown in its winter plumage (on the right).
MAIN REFERENCES:
Riley Black – Paleo Profile: the Greatest Auk – in National Geographic – 2015;
T. Gaston – Alcidae – in Encyclopedia of Ocean Sciences (Second Edition) – 2001;
Christopher E. Kovacs, Ron A. Meyers – Muscle diagram of Fratercula arctica – in Anatomy and Histochemistry of Flight Muscles in a Wing-Propelled Diving Bird, the Atlantic Puffin, Fratercula arctica – 2000;
Benedetto Lanza (curated by) – Dizionario Illustrato del Regno Animale – entry “Pinguinus” – 1982;
Elliott Ladd Coues – A Monograph of the Alcidae – in Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia – 1868.
