Word: auk
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From all over Britain they came, dealers, collectors, scientists, tweedy oölogists, pale studious curates. On the auctioneer's pulpit were bids from all over the world, for here was an occasion that might not come again in a lifetime. Six Great Auk eggs, all wrapped in cotton wool and lying in little boxes, and two stuffed Great Auk skins went on sale last week in Stevens auction rooms in London. They fetched a total...
...collector the late florid George Dawson Rowley of Brighton attempted to avoid competition by concentrating on the eggs and skins of the extinct Great Auk. He assembled the greatest collection of Auk eggs in the world before his death. At the sale last week Captain Vivian Hewitt (first aviator to fly the Irish Sea-1912) bought two eggs and two skins, for a total of $7,245, and these added to his previous collections made him in turn the world's greatest private Great Auk collector. The Rev. Francis Charles Robert Jourdain, Vicar of Ashburn-cum-Mapleton, president...
...since 1844 has a Great Auk (Alca impennis) trod the earth. It was a large flightless sea bird, slightly smaller than a goose and more docile. An expert swimmer and diver, its feet hurt so much that it often lay stretched prone on the rocks. The Auk laid only one egg a year but no two eggs were ever alike in size, shape or color...
...greatest show. And for each of its 24 displays Dexter Fellows has a resounding, polysyllabic jawbreaker of commendation. With his famed adherence to literal truth, he makes some concessions: "I admit we have no gorilla. I will go further and say we have no giasticutos, no hyfandodge, no auk. But we have things just as protolithic, and more macrobiosian...
Like the little auk, the murre feeds on ocean Crustacea, starves inland. Last week Dr. William Reid Blair, director of New York's Bronx Zoo, thought the murres' death flight might be caused by a cyclical failure in their food supply...