A taxidermied penguin-looking seabird at the Cincinnati Museum Center was the last of its kind in the world. That finding was confirmed by scientists in Europe and New Zealand and published recently in The Linnean Society of London .

The stuffed great auk has been at the Cincinnati Museum Center since 1974, but it took researchers combing through a trail of ancient DNA, letters, photographs and auction records to make the connection.

"Recently, we discovered that it is the last female that was ever captured in the wild," says Heather L. Farrington, Ph.D., curator of zoology at the museum. "It was actually a mating pair, a male and a female that were captured on an island called Eldey Rock off the coast of Iceland, and the male was found in a previous scientific study, but the female was

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