The Great Auk went extinct in 1844

 

The great auk was a large bird, that could not fly. People hunted it for meat and feathers. It grew rare, because it was too easy to kill, and the ones left could not breed fast enough to make up for the lost ones.

On 3 June 1844, the last two confirmed specimens were killed on Eldey, off the coast of Iceland, ending the last known breeding attempt. Later reports of roaming individuals being seen or caught are unconfirmed. A report of one great auk in 1852 is considered by some to be the last sighting of a member of the species. It lived mostly in the water, like a duck.

Penguins got their name from the great auk. The word "penguin" was the Celtic word for "great auk". When sailors saw penguins for the first time, they thought they looked like great auks.

The great auk was covered in black feathers, but had white feathers on its chest and abdomen. It had very short wings, like stubs, which meant it could not fly. On land it stood upright and was about 75 cm tall. They spent most of their time at sea, coming to shore in the summer to breed. They lived in large breeding colonies on low rocky islands in the north Atlantic Ocean from Canada to Norway. Females laid one egg on bare rock. In winter they went as far south as Florida and southern Spain.  

Charles Drew's Birth Anniversary

Charles Richard Drew, born on 3 June 1904, in Washington D.C., U.S., was an African American physician and surgeon who was an authority on the preservation of human blood for transfusion.

Drew was educated at Amherst College (graduated 1926), McGill University, Montreal (1933), and Columbia University (1940). While earning his doctorate at Columbia in the late 1930s, he conducted research into the properties and preservation of blood plasma. He soon developed efficient ways to process and store large quantities of blood plasma in “blood banks.” As the leading authority in the field, he organized and directed the blood-plasma programs of the United States and Great Britain in the early years of World War II, while also agitating the authorities to stop excluding the blood of African Americans from plasma-supply networks.

Drew resigned his official posts in 1942 after the armed forces ruled that the blood of African Americans would be accepted but would have to be stored separately from that of whites. He then became a surgeon and professor of medicine at Freedmen’s Hospital, Washington, D.C., and Howard University (1942–50). He was fatally injured in an automobile accident in 1950.