You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and I'm joined today by Liam Shaw, a welcome-funded research fellow

at the McLean Lab in Oxford, who has a piece in the latest issue of the paper on The Great Ork.

It's a review of the last of its kind, The Search for the Great Ork and the Discovery of Extinction

by Keesley-Palson, translated by Anna Yates. Hello, Liam, and thank you very much for talking to me today.

Hello, nice to be here. So I suppose what was the Great Ork, or perhaps, I should say, when was

and where was the Great Ork? So the Great Ork was a flightless black and white seabird that lived in

the North Atlantic and it was under a meter

tall and it was about the height of a two year old child probably and it looked like a penguin.

It's a kind of black and white bird that stands upright and waddles around but it's not

very closely related to penguins at all.

And of course, penguins are found in the Antarctic.

And interestingly, the word penguin originally came from the Great Ork.

So sailors, European sailors sailed in the North Atlantic and saw these flightless black and white birds, encountered them.

You know, they would live on coasts or on islands, isolated islands, and they gave them the

name penguin. Now, there's a debate over the etymology of that, whether it came, there's

sort of, I think, two competing ideas. One is that it comes from

Welsh, so that Welsh sailors saw them and called them penguin, meaning white head, because they

have a sort of white dot on their head. And the other is that it's from the Latin, pinguists,

which means fat, because the birds were very fat and made

for good eating. So whichever of those is the real etymology, they were called penguins. And then

when sailors made it down to the Antarctic and saw penguins there, they called them penguins

by analogy with great orcs. So the great hawk has dropped out of existence now, but it lives on in the fact that penguins kind of stole their name.

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