It was installed on a specially-built cairn at Fowl Craig at the north end of Papa Westray, to commemorate a great auk shot there in 1813. . The red clay bird has now lost its head due ...
A replica of a giant penguin-like bird which became extinct nearly 200 years ago has sold at auction for £25,000. The great auk was hunted to extinction in the mid-19th Century for its feathers ...
In the early 1800s, the birds were even more prized as they became steadily rarer, and collectors paid huge sums for just a single egg or skin. Demand from museums and collectors dealt a final, deadly ...
The legacy of this historical collecting is a reservoir of data on which much of our knowledge of birds is based and biological samples that modern ornithology can constantly revisit and explore in ...
The great auk was a flightless, populous and reportedly delicious bird, once found widely across the rocky outcrops of the North Atlantic. By the 1860s it was extinct, its decline sharpened by ...
From all over Britain they came, dealers, collectors, scientists, tweedy oölogists, pale studious curates. On the auctioneer’s pulpit were bids from all over the world, for here was an occasion ...