Great auks (Pinguinus impennis) were large flightless birds that thrived on rocky islands in the North Atlantic for thousands of years. However, humans hunted them to extinction within just a few hundred years, targeting the auks for their feathers, fat, meat and oil. The last breeding pair was killed by a fisher off the coast of Iceland in 1844, and the last sighting — of a single male, and potentially the last of its species — was off the Newfoundland Banks in 1852.
In his new book, "The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction" (Princeton University Press, 2024), anthropologist Gísli Pálsson recounts the final years of the great auk, using accounts and interviews from Victorian ornithologists John Wolley and Alfred Newton, who realized that species extinction was not something confined to the past but a tangible process that humans can cause.
