Penguins: Past and Present, Here and There

by George Gaylord Simpson

Documents the penguin's long history, from prehistoric ancestors to present-day varieties, and describes the appearance, behavior, habitat, and distribution of each of the eighteen living species

Hardcover

First published December 31, 1976

About the author

George Gaylord Simpson, Ph.D. (Geology, Yale University, 1926), was Professor of Geosciences at the University of Arizona from 1968 until his retirement in 1982. Previously was Curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University 1959–1970, Curator of the Department of Geology and Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History 1945–1959, and Professor of Zoology at Columbia University.

He was awarded the Linnean Society of London's prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1958. Simpson also received the Royal Society's Darwin Medal 'In recognition of his distinguished contributions to general evolutionary theory, based on a profound study of palaeontology, particularly of vertebrates,' in 1962. In 1966, Simpson received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an awesome little book! You will be taken on a tour of everything penguin, from the history of European discovery to etymological puzzles to fossil penguins to peculiar habits of modern-day birds. G. G. Simpson inserts funny little jokes and asides as well.

Just a few of the fun facts from this book:

-- “The first world tourist, a man named Pigafetta, accompanied Magellan. He kept a detailed diary, and Shakespeare actually borrowed names and details from the diary when he wrote the tempest“

-- “All fossil penguins known from South America to this day are from Patagonia, an informal name for the southern part of the Argentine mainland. Patagon in Spanish means big foot, so this is, or rather was, the land of the big feet, a name given by Magellan and recorded by Pigafetta. Pigafetta noted that the people of this land were "giants” and also that they wrapped their feet in skins, which made them seem even disproportionately large. They would not have seemed gigantic or particularly big-footed to us, but the Spanish explorers, certainly lacking nothing in toughness, were small men with dainty feet. Now Pigafetta's "giants" are long gone, as such, although they still have descendants most of whom speak a dialect of Spanish and consider themselves inheritors of European blood and culture.“

-- “they are separate places about 130 miles apart as the crow (or should it be the condor?) flies”

-- The word for penguin was first applied to great auks before their extinction at the hands of humans
- etymology a mystery! Latin pinguis (fat), English pub wing, welsh pen gwyn (white head)- but they had black heads!

-- Sir Francis drake and his men encountered a large island in the straits of Magellan where there killed thousands of penguins, saying they could not handle them alive because they “bite so cruellie with their crooked bills.” GG Simpson asks (who was acting “ cruellie?”)

-- “In France the great 18th-century naturalist Buffon became exercised by British stupidity in giving the same name to the northern birds, then not yet extinct, and to the similar but zoologically quite distinct southern birds. He proposed to confine the old name to auks and razorbills and to call the southern birds manchots, meaning one-handed or one-armed in French and thus applied by Buffon because of the supposed loss of function of the wings. As (southern) penguins in fact have two wings, both completely and strongly functional, this was not a happy example of French clarity and logic.”

[Penguing · Rating 5 out of 5]

So precious