Filthy, depraved necropheliac, rapist....
penguins.
Perverted' penguins shocked biologist so much he hid results
By Thomas H. Maugh II
June 11, 2012, 11:57 a.m.
The "perverted" sexual behavior of Adelie penguins shocked a British biologist on Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova mission to the South Pole so much that he never formally published his findings. Instead, he wrote a short monograph that was distributed to only a few fellow experts and that was lost for nearly 100 years. The short paper was recently rediscovered and is now on display at the Natural History Museum in Tring, England. The paper documented what George Murray Levick perceived to be necrophilia, homosexual behavior, abuse of young chicks and rape by what he termed "hooligan" males, but more modern research has demonstrated that the birds were simply responding to what they perceived to be sexual cues.
Levick was the resident biologist on Scott's 1910-13 mission to the South Pole — a feat they achieved only to discover that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them. Levick spent the entire Antarctic summer of 1911-12 observing Adelie penguins at Cape Adare, becoming the first and only researcher to monitor an entire breeding season. He documented their normal sexual behavior but also observed behavior he found so repulsive that he recorded his notes in Greek so that most other gentlemen couldn't read them.
At the end of the season, Levick and five others were waiting for the Terra Nova to pick them up, but pack ice kept the ship away and they were forced to spend the entire winter in an ice cave, living on blubber and meat from an occasional seal or penguin. When Levick returned to England in 1913, he wrote up his findings of normal behavior, which were published along with other results from the Scott expedition. He also wrote a short paper about the sexual perversions, but it was never published and only about 100 copies were printed and distributed to fellow penguin experts. The paper, called "Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin," was lost for decades, but a copy was recently unearthed by Douglas Russell, curator of birds and eggs at the Natural History Museum. He published the report and his own analysis of it in the journal Polar Record.
Levick witnessed males having sex with dead females — some dead for more than a year. In one case, he observed a male have sex with a female that was badly injured and could not walk. He also saw homosexual behavior and males having sex with baby chicks, sometimes right under their parents' eyes. Some chicks were crushed and injured, others were killed.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-perverted-penguins-20120611,0,32225.story
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