The great auk (Pinguinus impennis) displayed in the Natural History Museum of Denmark stands erect on its pedestal, its great beak jutting forward, apparently fearless. It is possessed of a certain dignity and grace. It demands my attention. It was probably killed off in Iceland, where I come from, and was one of the last of its kind. For thousands of years, these large, flightless birds swam the extensive waters of the North Atlantic and made their nests on islands and skerries, where each pair laid and incubated a single, uniquely patterned egg per year. According to most accounts, the last of the great auks were slaughtered on Eldey, an island off the southwest coast of Iceland, in June 1844. About eighty taxidermic examples of great auks exist in various museum collections, and most of them came from Eldey.
Alongside the great auk displayed in Copenhagen are four large glass jars. One is labeled: Iceland 1844, ♂. These jars contain the viscera of great auks killed on that famous (or infamous) expedition to Eldey. These are not all the birds’ organs; some are stored in another seven jars elsewhere in the museum, out of the public eye, along with another stuffed great auk. At my request, a museum guide takes me to see this second bird. It is posed somewhat differently than the one on display. Its beak is open, as if ready to address the visitor. Unlike the first bird’s stark black-and-white plumage, this one looks grayish and rather dull. I am told it is a true rarity; it is in winter plumage, while most great auks were captured while breeding, in early summer. Perhaps this second bird was caged alive and slaughtered in winter. Perhaps it was kept as a pet for some months, like the great auk owned by the Danish polymath Ole Worm (1588–1654), one of the leading figures of the Nordic Renaissance. Worm personally owned three great auks, one of which he sometimes walked on a leash, and he made a fine drawing of it before adding it—stuffed—to his Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, a precursor to the modern museum.
In its imposing old building in Copenhagen, only a fraction of the Danish museum’s “curiosities” are on display. In full, the collection comprises millions of animals from around the globe, and boasts exemplars of several species that have become extinct in recent centuries—such as a well-preserved skull of a dodo (Raphus cucullatus)—as well as fossils of dinosaurs and other organisms from previous eras of the earth’s history. Here, in this old and venerable museum, it is easy to detect the ideas that lay behind the collecting of natural objects for the past three and a half centuries. The need was perceived to educate the populace of various European nations, whose empires extended around the world, about the progression of time and about their place in the expanding universe. Such collections demonstrated the might and extent of each empire, and the value of research: all things can be named, catalogued, and categorized systematically.
Is such an approach still valid in our current era, now termed the Anthropocene, or Human Age? In our time, the “natural” habitat of the planet has been radically refashioned by humans. Vital links between species, developed over eons, have been severed swiftly, fundamentally impoverishing the living world and posing a serious threat of the mass extinction of many species. How, I wonder, can such a process possibly be cataloged or categorized, given the speed of change and the complexities involved— and what would be the point?
The bird species that no longer exist had, and still have, a special attraction. They have much to teach us.
Extinction
I never saw a great auk growing up in Iceland, a land where they had once been quite common. Neither did the nineteenth-century British naturalists John Wolley and Alfred Newton.
Like their contemporaries, Wolley and Newton busily collected birds’ eggs and specimens, classifying and recording them in the fashion of the Victorian age. When they set off for Iceland in 1858, they hoped to visit Eldey Island and study the rare great auk. They hoped to observe its behavior and habits and, perhaps, bring home an egg, or a skin, or a stuffed bird or two for their own cabinets of curiosities—unaware of the fact that the species had already been hunted to extinction. When they left Victorian England for Iceland, they teased that this was a “genuinely awkward expedition.” And so it proved to be, in many ways. They never made it to Eldey. Like me, they never saw a great auk on Iceland, not even a stuffed one.
Prior to the killing of the last great auks, extinction was either seen as an impossibility or trivialized as a “natural” thing. The great taxonomist Carl von Linné, or Linnaeus (1707–78), imagined that a living species could never disappear; for evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin (1809–82), species would naturally come and go in the long history of life. The great auk brought home the fact that a species could perish quite quickly and, moreover, not naturally, but primarily as a result of human activities. No other extinction had been documented as carefully.
During their historic expedition to Iceland in 1858, Wolley and Newton collected impressions of great auk hunting, through substantial interviews with the men who took part in the latest hunts and the women who skinned and mounted the birds, along with their prices and sales on foreign markets to collectors of “curiosities.” These impressions were preserved in the set of five handwritten notebooks Wolley titled the Gare-Fowl Books. Now archived in Cambridge University Library in England, their hundreds of pages are written in several languages (English, Icelandic, Danish, and German). As an anthropologist and an Icelander, once I had seen the Gare-Fowl Books, there was no turning back: I had to dive into the text and visit zoological museums and archives. For me, the great auk opened an intellectual window into ideas of extinction and their relevance to the current mass disappearance of species.
De-extinction
Many sightings of great auks were reported after 1844 on North Atlantic skerries in Iceland (1846, 1870), Greenland (1859 or 1867), Newfoundland (1852, 1853), and northern Norway (1848). Some of the reports were certainly apocryphal: people had mistaken another species for a great auk, or had seen what they wanted to see. Others were deemed credible and were probably true: evidence of a few dispersed pairs of birds continuing to breed on islands or skerries for a few years. Such tales were often unjustly dismissed, and unnecessarily strict standards of proof and corroboration were applied. The consensus among scholars today seems to be that the last living great auk was seen off Newfoundland in 1852.
Once it seemed clear that the last great auks were dead, museums and collectors around the world scrambled to acquire skins, eggs, and bones of the extinct bird. The Victorian obsession with collecting was past its peak, but anything relating to the great auk remained a prize. There are some eighty stuffed great auks in collections around the world, and an unknown number of preserved skins and viscera. Only about twenty-four complete skeletons exist, while thousands of loose bones (some with knife marks) are kept in museum collections. The skeletons do not have the visual appeal of the stuffed birds, mounted to look so lifelike in their full plumage. However, the bones—what Wolley and Newton termed “relics”—tell a long and complex story of their own. And there are about seventy-five great auk eggs believed to be extant today, the vast majority being documented and numbered.
Now and then over the years, various species have been said to reappear suddenly, after having been thought long exterminated. Several birds have been confirmed to be such so-called “Lazarus species,” including the Bermuda petrel (Pterodroma cahow), which scared Spanish explorers away with their eerie calls. Considered extinct for three centuries, it was rediscovered on one of the Bermuda Islands in 1951. Also, the flightless takahē (Porphyrio hochstetter) of New Zealand, which was claimed extinct late in the nineteenth century, reappeared in 1948. In recent years, with intensive searching, social media, and growing awareness of the threat of mass extinction, such reports have escalated. However, the possibility of any surviving great auk “Lazarus” can be ruled out.
Charles Darwin made the point that species swept away by history would not return. They were gone for good. In On the Origin of Species, he wrote: “We can clearly understand why a species when once lost should never reappear, even if the very same conditions of life, organic and inorganic, should recur.” This has long seemed blindingly obvious. No doubt many people have wondered why Darwin saw reason to state it at all. Yet his words were perhaps necessary at the time. The meaning of extinction had not yet been fixed, and Darwin may well have felt it was time to dispel the fantasy regarding the resurrection of species.
Alfred Newton, on the contrary, entertained the idea that extinction processes could be reversed. And in our own time, discussions of the renaissance, even resurrection, of species is taken for granted—as if Bible stories and the natural sciences had coalesced into one, after centuries of enmity and conflict. Will we live to see the resurrection of Pinguinus impennis? Might genetics and cloning do the trick?
In the spring of 2015, a group of like-minded individuals met at the International Centre for Life in Newcastle, England, to discuss the possible reanimation of the great auk. The meeting was attended by more than twenty people, including scientists and others interested in bird conservation. They addressed the principal stages of “de-extinction,” from the sequencing of the full genome of the extinct animal to the successful releasing of a proxy animal population into the wild. They were interested in resurrecting the great auk quite literally, to see it thrive once more, in zoos or even on the skerries and islands of the North Atlantic.
Thomas Gilbert, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen who has sequenced the great auk genome was one of the scientists who attended. The de-extinction of a species, however, has proved to be a more complicated issue than was originally anticipated—both technically and ethically. Gilbert pointed out that a re-created species can never be exactly like the original, and that the question must be asked: What counts as “near enough”—ninety-five percent, ninety, …? If the element that is lacking, though it may only account for a few percent of the genome, turns out to be crucial, and makes it harder for a re-created species to survive or to reproduce, nothing will have been gained. A re-created great auk that could not swim, for instance, would not be “near enough.” Likewise, a great auk capable of flight might be “way too much.” For most people, whatever the species concept to which they subscribe—and there remains a thriving philosophical debate on that subject—a flying bird would hardly qualify for legitimate member of the great auk species.
Yet a substitute bird that could swim would be welcomed by many, as it might fill in the large gap left by the great auk’s extinction. A substitute species might contribute to the rewilding of the oceans, a task that has barely begun; indeed “the underwater realm has been trailing behind its terrestrial counterparts.” Interestingly, this idea echoes Philip Henry Gosse’s historic aquaria project, reversing the arrows, from land to sea, and operating on a much larger scale. The grand aquarium of the planet’s oceans, including the recently discovered seabirds’ hotspot in the middle of the North Atlantic, or so the idea goes, could be repopulated by relatively large charismatic animals, territorially raised and later released into the oceans, where they would be managed and monitored by human divers. Gosse would be amused.
The expense of such de-extinction is high, however, and it is hard to decide which species should have priority: the mammoth? the dodo? the great auk? or perhaps one of the numerous species of tiny snails that rarely generate human concern? It’s tempting, and productive, to focus on tall birds and charismatic megafauna, but invertebrates such as snails and insects, which make up most of the animal kingdom (perhaps 99 percent), deserve attention too. In the Anthropocene, this age of mass human-caused extinctions, the selection of species is clearly an urgent, but difficult, concern. The re-creation of the great auk assuredly has symbolic significance, not least in light of the attention the species has garnered from both scholars and the public since its demise. The excessive price nowadays of great auk remains is significant too.
This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.3
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In January 2023, a great auk egg sold for $125,000 at Sotheby’s. But bringing the bird back to life is a gigantic challenge, if not an impossible one. Perhaps the funds that would be spent on the de-extinction of the great auk might be better spent elsewhere. Nor should we overlook the Law of Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences.
• • • • • •
Now that I know the great auk’s long history, I feel as if the stuffed birds in the Copenhagen museum were once my neighbors or acquaintances. As a scientist, I know that their viscera are stored in alcohol to preserve them and to enable people to study them. Still I wonder if the organs are in a constant state of inebriation from the alcohol, existing beyond the bounds of real time, in a sort of euphoric oblivion? Generations of visitors, of all ages and many nationalities, have passed by these jars of preserved bird parts over the past century and a half. What observations did they take home?
The hearts stored in one jar are no longer beating, but no doubt many visitors on my side of the glass have wondered, as I do, how they would have pulsed when the bird’s blood was still flowing—and whether they could be resuscitated, by electric shock or genetic reconstruction. The eyes of the last male great auk are kept in another jar. I see them staring, gazing into both the past and into my own eyes. 
This essay was excerpted and adapted by the author from The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction. Copyright © 2024 by Gísli Pálsson. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
About the Author
Gísli Pálsson is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Iceland. He previously held positions in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, the Centre for Biomedicine & Society at King’s College, London, and at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami. His books include The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction, Down to Earth, and The Man Who Stole Himself.
This article was published on October 25, 2024.
