A study on the sexual habits of penguins with findings so graphic and "perverted" that it remained hidden for nearly 100 years is finally being revealed to the public.

Curators from the National History Museum in Tring, in England have discovered an old paper written by Dr. George Murray Levick, a surgeon and medical officer who accompanied Captain Robert Scott on an expedition to the Antarctic in 1912, full of shocking revelations of the "astonishing depravity" among Adélie penguins.

During Levick's time in the Antarctic taking notes on the colony of Adélies at Cape Adare, he found that many male Adelie penguins would 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 said that the "hooligan" penguins, like people "degenerate in idleness".

The Edwardian explorer had witnessed males attempting to mate with other males and also with dead females, including many who had died the previous year.

Levick also reported that "hooligan males" would often "rape" or sexually coerce females, sexually and physically abuse chicks, occasionally killing them afterwards.

Levick was so horrified and shocked by the findings in his paper, the 'Sexual Habits of the Adelie Penguin', that he originally recorded his notes in Greek, and at one point even writing, "There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins."

"Levick's notes were decades ahead of their time and possibly the first ever attempt to reveal the more challenging aspects of bird behavioral strategies to the academic world," curator of birds at the Douglas Russell, who discovered the pamphlet, said in a statement.

"I'm very pleased that, 97 years after Levick submitted it for publication, the study has finally been published,' Russell added.

The full paper is published in the journal Polar Record.

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