Great auk
Pinguinus impennis (Linnaeus, 1758)
The great auk was a flightless North Atlantic seabird — the original "penguin" — killed for its down, meat and oil until the last confirmed pair was strangled on the Icelandic island of Eldey on 3 June 1844, with the female's single egg crushed underfoot.
Updated 25 July 2026
- Height
- About 75–85 cm
- Weight
- Approximately 5 kg
- Closest living relative
- Razorbill (Alca torda)
- Clutch size
- A single egg per year
- Final killing
- Eldey, Iceland, 3 June 1844
- Surviving specimens
- About 78 skins and 75 eggs worldwide
The great auk was a metre-tall flightless seabird that bred on remote North Atlantic islands and swam with a speed and grace that left it defenceless on land. It was the original penguin: the name was applied to it centuries before Europeans reached the Southern Hemisphere, and the Antarctic birds were named after it by resemblance. Its extinction is unusually well documented, and unusually damning, because the last stage was driven not by hunger but by collectors who wanted specimens precisely because the bird was nearly gone.
Key facts at a glance
- The great auk was the original "penguin". European sailors applied the name to it first; Antarctic penguins were named later for their resemblance, despite being unrelated.
- It stood about 75–85 cm tall, was flightless, and was an exceptional swimmer capable of diving deep in pursuit of fish.
- A single egg per year gave the species almost no capacity to absorb losses from harvesting.
- Great auks had been exploited for millennia — Neanderthal and early human sites contain their bones — but industrial-scale harvesting for down in the 1700s caused the collapse.
- The final phase was driven by collectors. As the bird became rare, museum and private specimen prices rose, and rarity itself became the incentive to kill the remaining birds.
- The last confirmed pair was killed on Eldey, Iceland, on 3 June 1844 by three fishermen commissioned by a collector. The egg the female was incubating was crushed in the process.
How was the great auk hunted to extinction?
Great auks bred in dense colonies on a small number of low, flat, predator-free islands, and they could not fly. Sailors could walk among them and kill them with clubs, or drive them up gangplanks directly into ships' holds. For centuries this was subsistence and provisioning: fishing fleets crossing the Atlantic used auk colonies as reliable food and bait stations. The lethal escalation came in the eighteenth century, when the European eiderdown trade collapsed local eider populations and harvesters turned to great auks for feathers. Crews were landed on breeding islands for entire seasons to kill birds, strip the down and boil the carcasses for oil, using the bodies of previous birds as fuel. Newfoundland's Funk Island colony, the largest known, was destroyed this way. By 1800 the species was reduced to a handful of Icelandic skerries.
The collectors who finished the job
The great auk's last years established a pattern that still drives wildlife trafficking today: rarity increases value, and increased value accelerates extinction. As the species became scarce, European museums and wealthy private collectors competed for skins and eggs, and prices climbed steeply. Icelandic fishermen were paid to raid the remaining colonies. The volcanic island of Geirfuglasker, the last major refuge, was destroyed by eruption in 1830, driving survivors to the more accessible Eldey. There, on 3 June 1844, three fishermen — Jón Brandsson, Sigurður Ísleifsson and Ketill Ketilsson — commissioned by a collector, strangled the last known pair. The egg the female was incubating was cracked underfoot and abandoned. The same economics operate now on totoaba swim bladders, pangolin scales and rhino horn: as supply falls, price rises, and the incentive to take the last individuals grows rather than shrinks.
Where it lived
North Atlantic — Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Britain, Scandinavia
The last one
The last confirmed pair was killed on Eldey, Iceland, on 3 June 1844
What caused it
- 1 Harvesting for down, meat, oil and fishing bait
- 2 Collecting by museums and private collectors as the bird became rare
- 3 Loss of safe breeding islands
What this extinction teaches
Rarity raises price, and price accelerates extinction. Any species whose value to traffickers increases as it becomes scarcer is in a self-reinforcing spiral that market forces will not correct — which is why enforcement and demand reduction, not scarcity, are the only things that stop it.
Still here — for now
Still facing the same pressure: Vaquita
Roughly 10 remain, drowning in gillnets set for totoaba, whose swim bladders rise in value with every fish removed. The great auk's extinction economics are running again in the Gulf of California, on a shorter timescale.
IUCN status: Critically Endangered
Did you know
The word "penguin" belonged to the great auk for at least a century before anyone in Europe had seen an Antarctic bird — which means the birds we now call penguins are, etymologically, named after a North Atlantic seabird that no longer exists.
Great auk: frequently asked questions
When did the great auk go extinct?
Was the great auk a penguin?
Why was the great auk killed?
How many great auk specimens survive?
Could the great auk be de-extincted?
Sources
How we check facts: our sourcing standards →