Penguins are birds that everyone is familiar with, whether it is as a darling in the aquarium or the image of QQ, we can often see it in our lives. Penguins are very special birds, they have lost the ability to fly, they are good at swimming, they have a chic posture, their behavior is cute, and they will glide on the ice with their belly, so that most people actually forget that this fat and cute animal is actually a kind of flightless bird.
Of the nearly twenty species of penguins that live, the vast majority live in Antarctica, and a small number are found in Central and South America, Africa and Oceania.
The northernmost penguin in the range is the Galapagos penguin spheniscus mendiculus, which lives in the Galapagos Islands of Central America and passes through the equator, so the Galapagos penguin is the only wild penguin that has the potential to appear in the northern hemisphere.
The penguins we often see in zoos and aquariums are emperor penguins, king penguins, Magellan penguins, rock-jumping penguins, Papua penguins and so on.
Papua penguin pygoscelis papua
Take a good look at the Papua penguin in the picture above, because next we will know a kind of "penguin" that lives in the Arctic.
As we all know, the English name of penguins is penguin, but this name is not unique to them, but the penguin "robbed" another bird. The Chinese name of this bird is pinguinus impennis, its earliest English name is penguin, and you can see through the Latin scientific name of the great auk, its genus name pinguinus and the word penguin are inextricably linked.
That is to say, penguin was originally the English name of the great auk (Pingouin in French and pinguine in German, pronounced similarly), but it was later taken away by penguins, so that when it comes to penguin, everyone will think of penguins, and few people know about great auks.
Let's first take a look at what the great auk looks like, see the picture below.
The great auk pinguinus impennis
How, is it particularly similar to penguins?
In fact, people discovered the great auk much earlier than the penguin, because although the Arctic is very cold, there are still humans settled, and it is located on the same continent as the human settlement. But Antarctica is different, Antarctica lies alone on the southern tip of the earth, where there has been no human settlement in history, and even the species of animals and plants are very small, so penguins are found later than the great auk.
As early as the 16th century, the flightless bird was known to european natives, and it was also described in woodcuts and literary works of the time. By 1758, Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, gave the great auk the name alca impennis, which in 1791 was changed to pinguinus impennis.
Thick-billed sea crow uria lomvia
In the 19th century, French sailors discovered the penguin living in Antarctica, found that it could not fly, and was very similar to the great auk in morphology, thinking that it was a relative of the great auk, so it was also called pingouin, which gradually evolved into penguin in English.
It is now known that penguins and great auks are similar in morphology as a result of convergent evolution, but they were not aware of it at the time, because the early taxonomy was based on morphology, and animal a is similar to animal b in appearance, and it will be easily grouped together. Now more advanced classification methods are based on gene sequencing and phylogenetics, which are more reasonable and more scientific than morphological differentiation.
When the French learned about the penguins in Antarctica, they corrected their names and no longer called penguins pingouin, but changed to their exclusive term manchot. However, the English-speaking countries did not change, or called penguins penguin, and they are still used today.
Knife-billed puffin alca torda
Not only that, after the penguins swept the world with their cute appearance and cute behavior, in order to show the distinction, they changed the English name of the great auk to great auk, and since then the word penguin has become the exclusive name of the penguin, and the most intuitive evidence that people can now know that it originally belonged to the great auk is the genus name pinguinus.
The tragedy of the great auk has not stopped, and after its name was deprived of the penguin, the great auk was hunted madly because its fur was waterproof and cold, and its flesh was delicious.
On June 3, 1844, the last pair of great auks was killed in Iceland and declared extinct.
Most of the puffin species that still live on Earth resemble penguins and are also the result of convergent evolution, but only the extinct puffins of the puffin family cannot fly, and the remaining ones, although they look like penguins, have the ability to fly.
Short-winged puffin alle
As an aside, it is not uncommon for animal a to rob animal b of its name.
For example, panda, the earliest is actually the name of the red panda, derived from the local language of Nepal, meaning "red cat and dog", even the Chinese "panda" originally belonged to the red panda (from the 1915 "Chinese Dictionary", the word panda with the picture for today's red panda, the internet rumor "cat bear upside down" is the old ballad of the century).
Later, French missionaries brought the specimen of the giant panda back to Europe, and after the original academic research, the giant panda was regarded as related to the red panda (in fact, it was not), so they named the giant panda gaint panda, and the original panda panda was changed to red panda or lesser panda, which is now the red panda.
Red panda ailurus fulgens
Giant panda later became a brother of the animal kingdom, so that people all over the world are crazy, now do not say the size, just mention the panda or panda, I believe that the vast majority of people will think of the national treasure giant panda, not the red panda, although the red panda is also very cute, the popularity is not low.
In addition, there are Mandarin ducks, in fact, the Mandarin Ducks we know now, before the Song Dynasty, the name was called The Partridge, and the Mandarin Ducks that were regarded as love birds at that time were actually today's Red Ma Ducks, and the Mandarin Duck patterns and text descriptions before the Song Dynasty can support this.
It is the partridge with its flowery appearance, and the nickname of "Purple Mandarin Duck", which gradually took the name of Mandarin Duck after the Song Dynasty, they are actually not loyal to love, the real Mandarin Duck, the real love bird is actually a red mallard duck, look around.
Red hemp duck tadorna ferruginea
Extant puffin species belong to the order Plover, a group of birds that live near the sea. Most of them have thick beaks and are good at swimming and fishing, which are similar to penguins. But the difference is that puffins can fly and are more agile on land than penguins.
However, although puffins have the ability to fly, most adult puffin species are accustomed to floating on the surface of the sea, eating and sleeping at sea, and basically only return to the shore during the breeding period.
In fact, there is another advantage of being able to fly, that is, it can escape the capture of humans to a large extent. At the beginning, the great auk was ended up in extinction because it could not fly and had a curiosity about humans.
I hope that people now can be kind to these cute wild animals.
Horned puffin cerorhinca monocerata