Not so long ago, the northern seas were full of great auks. Every summer, millions of the two-toned, goose-sized birds would gather at different breeding grounds across the North Atlantic. The flightless birds were easy to capture, and passing sailors loved how they tasted.
“In less than half an hour we filled two boats full of them,” the French explorer Jacques Cartier wrote after encountering a throng near Newfoundland in 1534. Collecting them was as easy “as if they had been stones.”
Just three centuries later, though, the species had become famous for its scarcity instead. Museums and merchants started paying top dollar for great auk eggs and skins. In 1844, members of a small expedition found two of the birds on an Icelandic island, strangled them and crushed their only egg. That was the last confirmed sighting. In this way, the great auk went extinct.
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