great auk ireland

), Ibis 3: 374 –99. Utterly defenseless, great auks were killed by rapacious hunters for food and bait. It wasn’t long after this that the species became extinct when the last known individuals were killed […] Ireland’s Last Great Auk housed in TCD’s Zoological Museum has undergone remedial repairs. 1865 . The Great Auk was the only flightless member of this family, which lived in the waters of the North Atlantic. On this date* in 1844, off the coast of Ireland, a pair of Great Auks were killed. Similar in appearance to smaller relatives in the Alcidae family, they were excellent swimmers and could evade capture by people hunting them in boats. The Great Auk was a flightless species. CrossRef Google Scholar Newton , A. The nearest living relatives are the razor-billed auks. It stood up to 33 inches tall and weighed about 11 pounds. The Great auk was found in coastal waters along northeastern United States, Canada, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Ireland, Faroe Islands, France, northern Spain and Great Britain. The Great Auk's scientific name, Pinguinus impennis, roughly translates to plump and flightless. The nesting colonies preferred rocky islands with sloping shorelines. It is believed that they had more than twenty breeding sites in … These proved to be the last specimens of Great Auk ever collected. This specimen, collected off Waterford in 1834, represents the last recorded sighting of this species in Ireland. The work involved conservation treatment on a range of specimens of extinct and endangered status. The Great Auk left the North Atlantic waters for land only in order to breed, even roosting at sea when not breeding. The last Great Auk recorded in Ireland was a bird spotted in May 1834 by David Hardy. Cabinet 20 in the Trinity College Zoological Museum is not crammed with specimens, instead it contains only one, the Great Auk. It was swimming in the sea under the cliffs between Ballymacaw and Brownstown Head near Tramore in Co Waterford. The Great Auk was a relatively frequent sight on the shores of the North Atlantic until the 19th century. It belonged to the family Alcidae (order Charadriiformes) and bred in colonies on rocky islands off North Atlantic coasts. It bred on cold, rocky, isolated oceanic islands, but only ones with a plentiful food supply, a rare combination in nature that provided only a few perfect breeding sites for the Auks. The Great auk or garefowl was a flightless seabird and has been extinct since 1844. Abstract of Mr J. Wolley’s researches in Iceland respecting the Garefowl or the Great Auk (Alca impennis Linn. The Great Auk was found in the cold North Atlantic coastal waters along the coasts of Canada, the northeastern United States, Norway, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Ireland, Great Britain, France, and northern Spain. The last great auk in Ireland was found off Brownstown Head in Waterford in 1834. Financed by a grant from the Heritage Council, the treatment was carried out by Mr James Dickinson of Lancashire Conservation Studios, Preston. Great auk, flightless seabird extinct since 1844. Since the Great Auk went extinct well into historical times—and a large number of stuffed specimens are on display in various natural history museums around the world—this bird is an excellent candidate for de-extinction, which would involve recovering intact fragments of its preserved DNA and combining it with the genome of the Razorbill. 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