Penguins Were Named After a Completely Different Bird That No Longer Exists ?! 🐧

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Penguin derived from the Welsh pen gwyn, meaning white head. This name originally referred to the great auk, a flightless North Atlantic bird that went extinct in the 19th century. When European sailors traveled south and saw similar flightless birds, they mistakenly applied the same name to the tuxedo-clad species of the Antarctic. Today, even though their heads are black, we still identify these iconic birds as