Extinct: Around 1844

Location: Its last refuge was the island of Eldey off

 Iceland but at one time it was widely distributed across

 the North Atlantic.

Demise: Hunted. “Its last refuges were deliberately sought

 out by seamen executing commissions for specimens from

 private individuals and institutions”.. The last recorded

 encounters offer a horrid list of  “human ignorance and

 cruelty”.

The Glass Great Auk beaks are scaled from accurate

studies of the collections at the Zoology Museum,

Cambridge.

 The people of Lundy, off the Devon coast spoke of

 “a garefowl, a murre so gigantic it was unable to fly,

 carrying a beak huge & grotesque enough to make the bill

 of its smaller relative, the razorbill, seem quite modest in

 comparison.”

“The exact appearance of this beak in life is uncertain.

its colour in the living bird was never precisely or

unequivocally registered”. However it was “blackish in

appearance with varying numbers of grooves - as many as

12 or as little as 3” The number of grooves could be used

as an indication of the bird’s age.

"There is an certain natural elegance in the notion that -

 during the breeding season the bill carried some white

 striping (as it does in the Razorbill) but the certain truth

 is that no-one really knows whether it did or not”