When you go to the zoo and get giddy about seeing the penguin enclosure, just know that those aren’t real penguins… they’re fakes.
That’s right. People are only just realizing that the penguins that we know and love to watch on nature documentaries are imposters.
A user posted on Reddit sharing the disturbing news, and people have been left stunned since.
The user wrote in the Today I Learned subreddit: “TIL that the birds we call Penguins today are not actually penguins at all but another species of bird that was named after them because of their looks and their are no true penguins alive today.”
Before you think this is fake news, it’s actually completely true.
Take a guess… is this a penguin you’ve seen before? (Wikimedia Commons / Ole Worm – Olaus Wormius)
According to history, the little fuzzy penguins we see on our screens are a completely different type of bird, who bear a striking similarity to the original penguins.
The original penguins were called the great auks, or Pinguinus impennis, and were native to the Arctic and sub-Arctic.
These little flightless birds were incredibly similar to modern-day penguins, except their beaks were a bit bigger and bulbous.
Despite their similarities, great auks were not actually closely related to penguins.
Their were once millions of the birds in the world up until July 3, 1844, when the National Geographic claims fishermen killed the last confirmed pair of the birds at Eldey Island, Iceland.
For hundreds of years, they were popular as meat and bait, and parts of their bodies, such as their fat, eggs, and feathers were sold as goods.
They lived in a range of areas (Wikimedia Commons/ Shyamal)
In the 1770s, overhunting the birds threatened the species, and as its population declined, museums and collectors were keen to keep part of the animal as proof of its existence.
That’s when museums decided to display the mounted skins of great auks, instead of the auks themselves.
Some believe the birds were killed by the fishermen because they blamed the birds for a storm, while others think it was on behalf of collectors who wanted to mount them for personal use.
However, nobody is really sure as to why the fishermen wiped out the last of the species.
But if they were still alive today, they’d be everywhere.
When they existed, they were found in Canada, Greenland, and Iceland, the British Isles, and Scandinavia.
They also lived in the western Atlantic, eastern Atlantic, and as far as southern Spain and New England in the United States.
The great auks met a gruesome end (Wikimedia Commons/ Mike Pennington)
Pleistocene records even believe they colonized in Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean, but as there are few studies on them, nobody can be sure.
People online were devastated to learn about the horrid fate of these birds.
Someone wrote: “I just visited the national history musem of Denmark with my kid, and saw the last stuffed Great Auk ever to be killed by a human.”
Another said: “Millions of years of evolution only for it to end right there and then in an instant.”
If you thought this was odd, wait until you hear about what Europe did with mummies.
