EMPEROR EGG: One of the penguin eggs retrieved by Edward Wilson and his team after an arduous journey through the Antarctic winter. Wilson thought the embryos contained in the eggs would reveal an evolutionary connection between birds and reptiles. © THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDONAt the dawn of the 20th century, the competition to be the first human to reach the South Pole was in full swing. After his failed 1901–1904 Discovery expedition, British explorer Robert Falcon Scott returned to Antarctica in 1909 for another shot at glory. But his Terra Nova expedition was about more than just bragging rights. Scott and his team undertook a multitude of scientific investigations in zoology, geology, and meteorology. In three years, the team collected tens of thousands of specimens and artifacts that spawned hundreds of scientific papers.
The mission’s chief zoologist, Edward Wilson, was a fervent proponent of Ernst Haeckel’s ill-fated “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” hypothesis, which held that all animals go through stages of development that mirror their evolution from distant ancestors. Wilson was convinced that the embryos of penguins, which he viewed (erroneously) as the world’s most primitive birds, would help establish an evolutionary link between birds and reptiles.
Dedicated to establishing this link, Wilson lobbied Scott to approve a more than 200-kilometer round trip to Cape Crozier, where Wilson and other scientists on Scott’s earlier expedition had spotted an emperor penguin rookery. “This was no whim by any stretch,” says Douglas Russell, curator of birds at the Natural History Museum in London. “Wilson was under no illusions about how dangerous ...
