Great Auk
Fast facts
- Conservation status
- Extinct
- Genus
- Pinguinus
Scientific name
- Scientific name
- Pinguinus impennis
How to say it in other languages
- Arabic
- أوك عظيم
- Chinese
- 大海雀
- Dutch
- Reuzenalk
- French
- Grand Pingouin
- German
- Riesenalk
- Italian
- Alca impenne
- Japanese
- オオウミガラス
- Korean
- 큰바다쇠오리
- Portuguese
- Torda-grande
- Russian
- Бескрылая гагарка
- Spanish
- Alca gigante
Facts from Wikipedia’s “Great auk” page and Wikispecies (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The great auk was a large bird, that could not fly. People hunted it for meat and feathers. It grew rare, because it was too easy to kill, and the ones left could not breed fast enough to make up for the lost ones. The last known great auks (there were two auks) were killed on June 3, 1844 in Iceland. It lived mostly in the water, like a penguin.
Penguins got their name from the great auk. The word “penguin” was the Celtic word for “great auk”. When sailors saw penguins for the first time, they thought they looked like great auks.
The great auk was covered in black feathers, but had white feathers on its chest and abdomen. It had very short wings, like stubs, which meant it could not fly. On land it stood upright and was about 75 cm tall. They spent most of their time at sea, coming to shore in the summer to breed. They lived in large breeding colonies on low rocky islands in the north Atlantic Ocean from Canada to Norway. Females laid one egg on bare rock. In winter they went as far south as Florida and southern Spain.
Written for younger readers
Great Auk, in simpler words
This version comes from Wikijunior, a set of books written for children aged 8 to 11. It is shorter and uses plainer language than the article above.
From Wikijunior: Extinct Birds
The Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis) was a flightless bird of the Auk family that became extinct in the mid-19th century. It was the only modern species in the genus Pinguinus, a group of birds that formerly included one other species of flightless giant auk from the Atlantic Ocean region.
It bred on rocky, scattered islands with easy access to the ocean and a sufficient food supply. When not breeding, the auks spent their time running around in the waters of the North Atlantic, ranging as far south as northern Spain and also around the coast of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Ireland, and Great Britain.
These birds were defenseless, meaning that they could not protect or save themselves, they were hunted for food and bait in the early 1800s by hunters. There was an enormous amount of Great Auks getting killed by hunters, the birds often being driven up a plank and slaughtered on their way into the hold of a vessel.
The last known Great Auks were killed in Eldey Island, Iceland. Many of the Great Auk’s eggs were said to have been sold to collectors for as much as £300 also. Since then, many auks and eggs were preserved in museums. A close relative of the Great Auk is the Razor Billed Auks.
The Great Auk had black backs, white abdomens (belly up to neck), upright posture, small wings, and a big beak. The Great Auk as standing point is about 75 to 85 centimeters (30 to 33 in) tall and weighing around 5 kilograms (11 lb) as adult birds. The bill (beak) was about 10 - 12 centimeters in appearance also.
Where this page comes from
The article above is adapted from “Great Auk” on Simple English Wikipedia, by its contributors. We removed reference markers, navigation boxes and tables, expanded measurement templates into readable numbers, and kept the prose otherwise intact. The simpler version is adapted from Wikijunior on Wikibooks.
Both sources are published under CC BY-SA 4.0, so this page is published under the same licence. You may share and adapt it, including commercially, as long as you credit the original and keep the same licence.
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