The Cincinnati Museum Center (CMC) just helped solve a nearly 200-year-old zoological mystery.
The museum says new research confirms that its ornithology collection holds the remains of the last-surviving female great auk (Pinguinus impennis), a now-extinct, flightless seabird. Researchers from Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom worked with curators and specimens from CMC to accurately identify the bird’s location using DNA and various records.
The great auk lived in the North Atlantic and resembled a cross between a penguin and a puffin. By the early 1840s, hunters after the birds’ meat, eggs and feathers had driven it to near-extinction. On top of the hunting, the birds’ increasing rarity attracted interest from European museums and collectors looking for specimens. The species went extinct in 1844 after members of an expedition to Eldey Island off the coast of Iceland killed the last-surviving male and female great auks and crushed the egg the birds had been guarding. The birds’ remains, including some of their organs, were preserved and sent to Denmark, but the specimens traded hands many times over the years, and their whereabouts had become a mystery.
To figure out if CMC’s great auk specimen was one of these last-surviving birds — there are 80 known specimens in the world — the research team took a small sample from the CMC bird’s toe pad. DNA sequencing confirmed the sample’s mitochondrial genome matched that of the known organs of the last female, which are currently at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.
“This study resolves a natural history mystery that has puzzled great auk scholars and those within the museum industry for over 180 years,” the authors of the study wrote. “Resolving the mystery of their whereabouts not only highlights the use of ancient DNA to resolve questions such as this but also provides a long sought-after conclusion to the story of great auk extinction.”
To trace the great auk’s journey to Cincinnati, researchers established its provenance through letters, photographs and auction records. After the great auks were killed, their remains changed hands several times until 1869, when English naturalist George Dawson Rowley purchased the female great auk specimen. After his death in 1878, he left both the male and female specimens to his son, who sold them at an auction in 1934 to aviator and ornithologist Capt. Vivian Hewitt, who kept the birds at his home in the Bahamas until his death.
The birds were sent to auction again in 1974, where a donor purchased the female specimen (though they thought it was the male bird) and donated it to CMC’s predecessor, the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History. The great auk was put on display in 1976 in a diorama painted by Cincinnati naturalist and artist John A. Ruthven and was later moved to the ornithology collection when the museum relocated to Union Terminal in 1990. In 1993, a seabird expert corrected the bird’s gender in a letter to the museum’s zoology curator.
The museum notes that Cincinnati has an unfortunate connection to bird extinctions. In 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo, followed four years later by the last Carolina parakeet. The great auk’s story is yet another example of extinctions attributed to humans.
This research was published in an article in The Linnean Society of London in September. You can read the article here.
Cincinnati Museum Center, 1301 Western Ave., West End. More info: cincymuseum.org.
