Homosexuals tried to cast this as normal behavior, but
deliberately left out those parts that show homosexuality
belonging to acts of depravity.
Necrophilia, rape, masturbation — it’s just another day for an
Adélie penguin, in the eyes of a gentleman scientist.
That’s what George Murray Levick, a doctor who journeyed
alongside Captain Robert Scott to the Antarctic, recorded when
his expedition spent almost a year in 1911-1912 at Cape Adare,
on the Ross Sea. Levick recorded these observations — which he
deemed evidence of “astonishing depravity” on the part of the
penguins — and attempted to share them when he returned home to
Britain, but the Natural History Museum of London ultimately
deemed the report too salacious for publication.
Douglas Russell, a curator of birds’ eggs and nests at the
Natural History Museum at Tring, in Hertfordshire, England,
rediscovered Levick’s long-forgotten report on the sexual
proclivities of the adélie penguins while researching for
another project. The document — which was stamped with “Not for
publication” in bold letters — was rather shocking, he told The
Telegraph.
“It is the most graphic account of challenging sexual behaviour
you are every going to read. It is challenging now, but for 1915
when [Levick] submitted it for publication, it is
extraordinary,” he said. ”It would have been a bombshell if they
had published it at the time.”
Adélie penguins are famous for engaging in prostitution and
regular thievery, but some of the revelations in Levick’s report
go well beyond these behaviors – for example, this description
of an attempt by a male penguin to copulate with the frozen
corpse of a female, as quoted in the Telegraph:
“I saw a cock engaged in the sexual act upon the dead body of a
white-throated Adélie of the previous year. This took somewhat
over a minute, the position taken up by the cock differing in no
way from that of normal copulation.”
Still, these shocking sexual activities may not have ultimately
led to the museum’s decision not to publish Levick’s
observations. Rather, the fact that the penguins occasionally
engaged in homosexual acts could have been the tipping point for
suppression. Russell told the Telegraph that the doctor-turned-
explorer may have coded his notes in Greek because he feared the
repercussions of describing the penguins’ homosexual behavior —
acts which were still illegal in Britain at the time.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/06/12/the-perverted-penguins-that-
scandalized-the-scott-expedition/?iid=nf-article-mostpop1