This is the Guardian. In 1910, Robert Scott and his fellow explorers set off across the Icefields of Antarctica

on their fateful mission to conquer the South Pole. The tragic expedition went down in history, but what's less

well known is another story which began on that trip and only emerged a century later. On that expedition was the ship surgeon, a man called George Murray Leavick, and as was common for that time,

Leavick was also the ship's naturalist and photographer.

Josh Davis is a science writer at the Natural History Museum in London.

And while Scott went off on his expedition to the South Pole, Levick and a few other men basically spent 11 months at a place called Cape Adair where they have what is the largest breeding colony of Adele penguins.

Levick was the first scientist to witness and record the entire breeding cycle of the Odelli penguins.

And whilst he was observing these behaviors, he sort of saw some behavior some activity that he

basically couldn't really understand. This included things like forced

copulation, necrophilia, and also homosexual behaviors.

Levick was presumably so confused and maybe sort of,

to a certain extent, disturbed, I guess,

about these behaviors that he wrote some of,

the observations up in a Greek cipher and I think

the assumption here is so that sort of prying eyes wouldn't necessarily be able to read what he

had seen and what he was observing.

When Levick returned to the UK, he tried to publish his findings, including the sexual behavior of the penguins. But at that point, the section which he had written on the sexual activity, the sexual behavior of the penguins, was excised by the then keeper of zoology at the Natural History Museum.

And it wouldn't be until almost a hundred years later when a copy of this

pamphlet was discovered sandwiched between two books at the Natural History Museum

in Tring, that the sort of nature of this story was discovered really.

What I find really fascinating about that story is that it shows really clearly how in certain cases the history of homosexual behaviors is one which has been

covered up explained away or disparaged. Fast forward to 2024 and

...