London's Natural History Museum has unearthed a landmark study by Dr Levick, a scientist with the ill-fated 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition, detailing the birds' sexual shenanigans, The Guardian newspaper reported on Saturday.

Homosexual acts, sexual abuse of chicks and even attempts by male penguins to mate with dead females are recorded in Dr Levick's paper Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin, which had been lost for decades.

The Edwardian Englishman was so horrified by his own findings that he initially recorded them in Greek to make them inaccessible to the average reader.

Male penguins gather in "hooligan bands of half a dozen or more and hang about the outskirts of the knolls, whose inhabitants they annoy by their constant acts of depravity", he later wrote in the paper in English.

To this day, Dr Levick is the only scientist to have studied an entire breeding cycle at Cape Adare, after he spent the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 there, The Guardian said.

Captain Robert Scott and four others perished after reaching the South Pole on January 17, 1912 – only to find Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it more than a month earlier.

But Dr Levick survived, despite having been forced with five others to spend an entire Antarctic winter in an ice cave with few supplies after the expedition ship, Terra Nova, was blocked by ice on its way to rescue them.

Back in Britain, his findings about the species' astonishing sexual behaviour were considered so shocking that they were not published.

The groundbreaking paper had been lost until the recent discovery of a copy by Douglas Russell, curator of birds at the Natural History Museum.

Mr Russell said the penguins' sexual inexperience is to blame for the antics that so disgusted Dr Levick.

"Adelies gather at their colonies in October to start to breed. They have only a few weeks to do that and young adults simply have no experience of how to behave.

"Hence the seeming depravity of their behaviour." AFP