The dark side to penguins

Reputation: Penguins only live in icy regions near the poles. Penguins form lifelong loving relationships with their partners and are the perfect caring parents.

Reality: Most penguin species live in temperate or tropical places. They frequently cheat on their partners and engage in homosexual acts. Penguin mothers kidnap each other's chicks.

In 1911, the English explorer Captain Robert Scott sent three men from his Antarctic base on a mission: to collect three emperor penguin eggs. But it was the middle of winter. As temperatures plunged to -60 °C the youngest explorer, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, shattered most of his teeth by chattering in the cold.

Cherry-Garrard could have been forgiven for resenting the birds. Instead, he was enchanted. He later wrote that the knee-high Adelie penguins living around their camp were like funny little men "late for dinner, in their black-tail coats and white shirt-fronts" - although this did not stop him eating them.

Over a century later and the world has gone penguin-mad. We are delighted by their upright waddling, flappy arms, ridiculous fluff-ball chicks and adults that get around by tobogganing.

Yet we have a long history of getting them wrong.

Early explorers thought penguins were fish, then quickly changed their minds: they were plainly half-way betwaeen fish and birds. By Scott's day the leading theory was that penguins had not yet evolved to fly and might be the missing link between birds and dinosaurs. It was hoped the answer would be revealed by studying their eggs.

We now know that the first penguins waddled the Earth around 70 million years ago.

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