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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 ...

written after he found himself the recipient of the archive of a man who accumulated more Great Auk skins than anyone else. It all makes this long-extinct bird a symbol of human folly and the ...

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 ...

Biologists have identified common features in species that have vanished since 1500, finding that large body size and specialised niches made birds vulnerable to extinction.