people on that expedition looking for evidence for that connection.

Larson: The idea was out there. Biologists had suggested maybe birds came from reptiles. T. H. Huxley had suggested that in the late 1800s. One of the main goals of the expedition, one of the reasons why it was funded by the British government and backed by the Royal Society, was to look for just that evidence. Because they thought back then that penguins were the oldest form of most ancient species of birds. And penguins were very little known, certainly the emperor penguin was literally unknown before Scott's first expedition, and they wanted to go down there and study penguins, study the penguin lifestyle, study the penguin life cycle, and try to see if there was evidence inthese penguins of a connection to reptiles—basically that they might have been a living fossils as it were. So they were looking into those questions, which was right on the cutting edge of science. It wasn't just, they weren't just collecting a few specimens on the side. They were actually trying to conduct scientific research. And this, even though Scott himself wanted to get to the pole and Scott himself was a leader—he wasn't a scientist himself—he became interested in the science. He had teams that he had to provision and he had to send out, and many of the men that were on his expedition to the pole, the group that went all the way to the pole, many of them had already been taxed by earlier