The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

ten thousand British pounds to buy the auk back. (One woman I spoke to,
who was ten years old at the time, recalled emptying her piggy bank for
the effort.) Icelandair provided two free seats for the homecoming, one
for the institute’s director and the other for the boxed bird.
Guðmundur Guðmundsson, who’s now the institute’s deputy
director, had been assigned the task of showing me the auk.
Guðmundsson is an expert on foraminifera, tiny marine creatures that
form intricately shaped shells, known as “tests.” On our way to see the
bird, we stopped at his office, which was filled with boxes of little glass
tubes, each containing a sampling of tests that rattled like sprinkles when
I picked it up. Guðmundsson told me that in his spare time he did
translating. A few years ago he had completed the first Icelandic
rendering of On the Origin of Species. He’d found Darwin’s prose quite
difficult—“sentences inside sentences inside sentences”—and the book,
Uppruni Tegundanna, had not sold well, perhaps because so many
Icelanders are fluent in English.
We made our way to the storeroom for the institute’s collection. The
stuffed tiger, wrapped in plastic, looked ready to lunge at the stuffed
kangaroo. The great auk—Pinguinus impennis—was standing off by itself, in
a specially made Plexiglas case. It was perched on a fake rock, next to a
fake egg.
As the name suggests, the great auk was a large bird; adults grew to be
more than two and a half feet tall. The auk could not fly—it was one of the
few flightless birds of the Northern Hemisphere—and its stubby wings
were almost comically undersized for its body. The auk in the case had
brown feathers on its back; probably these were black when the bird was
alive but had since faded. “UV light,” Guðmundsson said gloomily. “It
destroys the plumage.” The auk’s chest feathers were white, and there
was a white spot just beneath each eye. The bird had been stuffed with its
most distinctive feature—its large, intricately grooved beak—tipped
slightly into the air. This lent it a look of mournful hauteur.
Guðmundsson explained that the great auk had been on display in