“Q: Please, do tell us about the evil latin penguin paper.”
The story goes like this. One Dr. George Murray Levick R.N. signed up for a trip to Antarctica to see some adorable Adélie penguins, staying for so long that he and his shipmates became the first people to see the entire breeding cycle of the species. Being a good Edwardian Englishman/zoologist, he returned to publish a scientific paper titled Natural History of the Adelie Penguin. Just your regular, old-timey observations-style paper; social habits, hunting, what have you. Good, normal stuff.
Of course, that is until you find the missing section. Removed from the original, unpublished, and coded in Ancient Greek (so that only men of learning, with the constitution to handle these shocking details, could read them) the follow-up notes titled Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin is where it’s at. Have a taste of this delightful little excerpt from the abstract:
“The account, based upon Levick’s detailed field observations at Cape Adare (71°18′S, 170°09′E) during the course of the British Antarctic (Terra Nova) Expedition 1910, commented on frequency of sexual activity, autoerotic behaviour, and seemingly aberrant behaviour of young unpaired males and females including necrophilia, sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks, non-procreative sex and homosexual behaviour.”
Poor Levick was traumatized, and decided that signing up for several world wars sounded way better than being a zoologist anymore (jk, he was conscripted), but pioneered several very cool things that you should read more about if you have the time.
Nearly 100 years later, a copy of these notes was found hidden in the collections of the Natural History Museum of Tring, England. In that time, all of these behaviors (and more, undoubtedly) were confirmed to be common among young adult Adélies with little experience in interpreting breeding cues. Levick may never have been the same again, but he sure was good at science.