The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction

By Gísli Pálsson

Translated from the Icelandic by Anna Yates

Princeton University Press 2014

For millions of years, the great auk (Pinguinis impennis) would congregate in numberless, deafening congeries drawn from their pelagic huntings to the rocky skerries of the North Atlantic in vast nesting colonies. The auk was a big flightless bird, as tall as a toddler, with a great ridged beak that made it a formidable predator when it was curving and diving in the freezing black water. It was correspondingly awkward on land, but for millions of years that hardly mattered.

Then the great auk began encountering humans, and a bitter, familiar story began unfolding. That story is the subject of The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction, the new English-language translation (by Anna Yates) of the 2020 book by Gísli Pálsson, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Iceland. Pálsson knows the barren coastlines and cold horizons that were once the home of the great auk, and in these pages he tells two stories: the 19th-century hunt conducted by British naturalists Alfred Newton and John Wolley for any remaining auks , and the the gradually-dawning reality that neither they nor anyone else would ever see a living auk again. 

Pálsson affectionately profiles Wolley and Newton and thereby gives readers a colorful view of what ornithology and natural history was like in the decades immediately before the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, decades full of specimen-shooters and egg-collectors plying their hobbies against the backdrop of what was considered the infinity bounty of the natural world. This conception of the natural world was already fraying across the Atlantic, as the numbers of bison and passenger pigeons were dwindling rapidly, but it was the great auk that brought the matter into the spotlight for the British public. 

At the time, Pålsson writes, “evolution skeptics” saw the very idea of species extinction as conflicting with the Bible, although it was grudgingly allowed that perhaps some species had it coming. “Was it possible,” these skeptics asked, “that the Divine Maker had created imperfect, second-class creatures, destined to become extinct?” 

Not so the great auk. It had thrived in its great multitudes and had only begun to disappear once humans began to kill it. As Newton and Wolley continued mounting search after search for some evidence of the bird (the last confirmed sightings were in 1844), it became increasingly clear that not only was the great auk gone from the world but that nothing about its disappearance had been natural. As Pálsson puts it, neither Newton nor Wolley could guess that their forlorn searches would be documenting a turning point. “They were not just tracking a rare – or missing – species but also identifying a key moment in the history of human-animal relations.” Before that key moment, extinction was a fringe and divinely-ordained phenomenon. After, “the extinction could no longer be thought of as inevitable, positive, long-term, and independent of humans.”

The disappearance of the great auk removed a species from the world and added a concept: the idea of willful extinction. It’s a melancholy exchange, but it’s good to have this thoughtful exploration now available to an English-language audience. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News