London's Natural History Museum has unearthed a landmark study into penguins that details homosexual acts, sexual abuse of chicks and attempts by male penguins to mate with dead females.

George Murray Levick, a scientist with the ill-fated 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition, risked freezing or starving to death to prepare his paper, Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin, which had been lost for decades.

Levick was so horrified by his own findings that he initially recorded them in Greek to make them inaccessible to the average reader.

Male penguins gather in "hooligan bands of half a dozen or more and hang about the outskirts of the knolls, whose inhabitants they annoy by their constant acts of depravity," he later wrote in the paper in English.

To this day, Levick is the only scientist to have studied an entire breeding cycle at Cape Adare after he spent the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 there.

Fatal mission

Captain Robert Scott and four others perished after reaching the South Pole on January 17, 1912 - with the survivors left to discover that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it more than a month earlier.

Levick was amongst the survivors, despite having been forced with five others to spend an entire Antarctic winter in an ice cave with few supplies after the expedition ship, Terra Nova, was blocked by ice on its way to rescue them.

Back in Britain, he published a paper called Natural History of the Adelie Penguin, but his findings about the species' astonishing sexual behaviour were considered so shocking that they were omitted.

This material was used for a short separate study, Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin, that was privately passed around a few experts.

The groundbreaking paper - which came around 50 years ahead of the next study on the subject - had been lost until the recent discovery of a copy by Douglas Russell, curator of birds at the Natural History Museum.



Mr Russell has had the paper published in the journal Polar Record along with an analysis of Levick's work.

Mr Russell told the Guardian's sister Sunday newspaper, The Observer, that the penguins' sexual inexperience is to blame for the antics that so disgusted Levick.

"Adelies gather at their colonies in October to start to breed. They have only a few weeks to do that and young adults simply have no experience of how to behave," he explained.

"Hence the seeming depravity of their behaviour."

AFP