George Murray Levick

George Murray Levick (1876–1956) was a British Antarctic explorer, naval surgeon and founder of the Public Schools Exploring Society (now the British Exploring Society).

Levick was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, the son of civil engineer George Levick and Jeannie Sowerby. He studied medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital and was commissioned in the Royal Navy in 1902. He was secretary of the Royal Navy Rugby Union at its founding in 1907.

He was given leave of absence to accompany Robert Falcon Scott as surgeon and zoologist on his Terra Nova Expedition. Levick photographed extensively throughout the expedition. Part of the Northern Party, Levick spent the austral summer of 1911–1912 at Cape Adare in the midst of an Adélie penguin rookery. As of June 2012^[update], this has been the only study of the Cape Adare rookery, the largest Adélie penguin colony in the world, performed and he has been the only one to spend an entire breeding cycle there. His observations of the courting, mating, and chick-rearing behaviours of these birds are recorded in his book Antarctic Penguins. His notes about the penguins' sexual habits, which included sexual coercion, sex among males and sex with dead females, were deemed too indecent for publication at the time; So he wrote them in Greek so that only an educated gentleman would be able to read them. They were rediscovered and published in the journal Polar Record in 2012. The discovery significantly illuminates the behaviour of a species that is an indicator of climate change.

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