Species profile
Pinguinus impennis
Great auk
EX · Extinct — Extinct — no living individuals remain
About this species
Great auk (Pinguinus impennis) is part of the curated SpeciesWatch catalogue and is classified as Extinct. The great auk was the original penguin — the name was later borrowed for the unrelated southern birds that look so similar. The overall trend remains uncertain or is not applicable, so it should not be inferred from a small number of observations.
Habitat, behaviour and ecological role
This profile associates the species with marine, island. These labels summarise environments used during different stages of its life rather than drawing an exact range boundary. Flightless but superb swimmers, great auks were hunted for feathers, oil and meat until the last confirmed pair was killed in Iceland in 1844. Its anatomy and behaviour are responses to those environments, while movement can connect distant places requiring different forms of management.
Why this species is at risk
Great auks bred in dense, noisy colonies on rocky islands, standing upright in black-and-white plumage almost identical to today's penguins — a striking case of convergent evolution. The catalogue records 1 principal pressures for this profile: Overhunting. They should not be treated as isolated causes. Habitat change, exploitation, pollution, disease and climate stress can reinforce one another, while the importance of each pressure varies between regions and through time.
Conservation outlook
Direct protection needs to combine enforcement with conflict prevention, demand reduction and local benefits that make coexistence viable. Actions need long-term monitoring and revision as evidence changes; a positive intervention in one place does not by itself represent recovery across the species.
Editorial review: 2026-08-21
Threat factors
Known occurrences
Dots are georeferenced occurrence records from OBIS (marine) and GBIF (global), not individual animals and not a complete range map. Up to 500 recent API results are cached; the profile renders at most 500 points.
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