The great auk egg

The Zoology Museum has in its collections an egg of the extinct great auk Pinguinus impennis. The egg, which is not normally on public display was at one time in the French Royal collections and is inscribed 'Pingouin', the French name for the great auk. The inscription was written by Monsieur Dufresne, keeper of the King's cabinet in Paris in the early nineteenth century.

From 1847 to 1863 the egg was in the hands of a Monsieur J. Hardey of Dieppe, a ship-owner and noted ornithologist. Hardy bequeathed the egg to his son Michel who loaned it to the Dieppe museum. Michel's daughter, Madame Ussel of Eu, put the egg up for auction at Steven's Rooms in London in London on February 9 1909. With the financial support of Lord Strathcona, Mr Hay Fenton of Lombard Street London acquired the egg for 190 guineas (£199.50) and two days later presented it to the Natural History Department of Aberdeen University.

Large breeding colonies of the flightless great auk once gathered on rocky islands and coasts of the North Atlantic in Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles and Scandinavia. A strong swimmer, the great auk migrated to winter as far south as Florida and southern Spain. Its extermination began with a slaughter for food and eggs by local inhabitants, but its fate was sealed when bird feathers became fashion items.

On June 4, 1844, three fishermen named Jon Brandsson, Sigurdr Islefsson and Ketil Ketilsson made a trip to the Icelandic island of Eldey. They had been hired by a collector named Carl Siemsen who wanted auk specimens. Jon Brandsson found an auk and killed it. Sigurdr Islefsson found another and did the same. Ketil Ketilsson had to return empty handed because his companions had just completed the extinction of the great auk.

Great auk by William Macgillivray
© Natural History Museum London

Professor William Macgillivray, Regius Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen, had produced a magnificent watercolour painting of the great auk in 1839. The painting was based on a preserved specimen belonging to the great American artist J.J. Audubon, a close friend of Macgillivray's. Drawn to accompany his 5 volumes on British birds, MacGillivray's watercolours are stunning works of art and he captured the remarkable Great Auk with his delicate touch, while retaining scientific accuracy. The original is now housed in the Natural History Museum, London.

Aberdeen conservationist shocks the scientific world.

In 1988, the Aberdeen egg was the centre of a marvellous and prophetic April Fool's joke. Remember, this was a full 3 years before the publication of Jurassic Park!

April 1st 1988

In the morning News Bulletin, the local Aberdeen radio station Northsound announced to the world that a living specimen of a bird known to have been extinct for around 150 years had been successfully hatched in Aberdeen. Dr Robert Ralph a senior lecturer in the Zoology Department at Aberdeen University was the leader of the team that succeeded in this remarkable feat. This is the story in his own words as announced on Northsound.

“When I started looking after the Zoology Museum I soon realised that one of the treasures of the collection was an egg of the Great Auk. This bird was once common throughout the North Atlantic from Europe to Canada. It was a flightless bird, a little bigger than a guillemot, and was regarded as a northern hemisphere , although it technically was an auk and not a penguin. Being unable to fly made it vulnerable to exploitation by man and through the first half of the 19th century hundreds of thousands of birds were killed for food, were boiled down for oil and feathers. As the birds became scarce, they were collected for a well-paid trade in skins and eggs. The last known living pair and one egg were taken in Iceland in 1844, and the great auk is now represented in collections only by bones, skins, and eggs. I was aware of the great advances in cell and molecular biology and in genetics and began to think that if we could get some DNA from any dried yolk inside the egg, we might be able to incubate it another bird’s egg and recreate the lost species.

We washed out the inside of the egg with some saline solution and did manage to get some DNA. Although it wasn’t in the best condition it was all we had. We had decided to use ordinary goose eggs as the host and we took three fertile eggs and bombarded them with X-rays to kill the goose embryos and then injected the precious material into them. We had no real idea of how long the incubation might be but after three weeks we attached some sensitive microphones to the outside of the shell to see if we could detect anything. From just one of the eggs, the other two proved to be infertile, we could hear a faint scratching noise, you could imagine the excitement in the lab.

We knew that goose incubation was about 28 – 30 days so began listening very carefully and the scratchings became louder at 32 days. Of course the next problem was that we had no idea if the chick would be able to get out, perhaps it needed a mother substitute to help it. This was the most critical part of the whole operation but I took the decision at 34 days to make a tiny hole in the shell. It was a bit like the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb but inside I could see a chick that was obviously alive and well and ready to hatch so we carefully removed the shell. There is was, something no living person had ever seen, the first Great Auk on the face of the planet for 144 years.

We dried it off and offered it some minced herring which it took with gusto. This all happened about a week ago but we waited until today to announce the news, wanting to make sure the chick, nicknamed Auky, would survive.

Of course one great auk chick is not much use so we now have to contact other museums with eggs to see if they will allow us to repeat the procedure on the eggs. There are known to be just 74 eggs in the museums of the world, and most of them are in the UK so with a bit of luck and co-operation this incredibly exciting venture may succeed in bringing the species.

I am sure that the technique or something similar to it can find applications with other extinct animals. Who knows it may be possible one day to visit an island full of dinosaurs!"