The Last of Its Kind Gísli Pálsson (Princeton University Press Out now in the US; in the UK 2 April) IN 1858, John Wolley and Alfred Newton, two British scientists, travelled to Iceland to study ...

Charles Darwin and Carl Linnaeus assumed that extinction was either impossible or something that took place over millennia.

Island ranger Jonathan Ford first visited in pursuit of the Great Auk in 2005. He now lives in Papa Westray and shows visitors its sights and its birds. "I became obsessed with black and white ...

Two preserved great auk specimens displayed at a museum in 1971. The last pair of great auks were killed in 1844.