Great auks (Pinguinus impennis) were large flightless birds that thrived on rocky islands in the North Atlantic for thousands ...

Pictured below is the last remaining specimen of a British great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction in the nineteenth century. It is a lesson in what can happen to an ocean-dwelling ...

This is Birkhead’s account of the first to go—the Great Auk, written after he found himself the recipient of the archive of a man who accumulated more Great Auk skins than anyone else.

I have spent five years tracking down more than 10,000 accounts of wildlife by naturalists, travellers, historians and even poets, all written between 1529 and 1772 ...