Master of Arts student Stephanie Pfennigwerth wins the William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize
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Stephanie Pfennigwerth has won the William T. Stearn Student Essay Prize, an annual competition run by the UK-based Society for the History of Natural History. The Prize was instituted in honour of the late William T. Stearn, a scholar whose work contributed much to the field of natural history, and to the Society. The Prize is awarded to the best original unpublished essay in the field of history of natural history, written by an undergraduate or postgraduate student in full or part-time education, anywhere in the world.
The title of Stephanie's essay is " 'The mighty cassowary': the discovery and demise of Dromaius ater (Vieillot), the King Island emu." The essay stems from Stephenie's Master of Arts thesis, which is about the natural and cultural history of the King Island emu, a unique and relatively unknown dwarf species driven to extinction in 1805. The essay discusses how human error, assumption, imagination and circumstance not only hampered scientific recognition and understanding of the King Island emu, but had material consequences on its conservation. In particular it examines the Baudin expedition of 1801-04, the only scientific expedition to collect specimens and make a detailed contemporaneous description of the birds' life history. Stephanie argues that rather than increasing knowledge about the species, the expedition and its literature contributed, albeit unwittingly, to the King Island emu's textual and literal extinction.
