The Adélie penguin is one of three species now assigned to the genus Pygoscelis. The bird was later placed in several other genera, including Eudyptes, Pygoscelis and the now-defunct genus Dasyrhamphus, and was also later inadvertently redescribed as Pygoscelis brevirostris. They used specimens collected from an area of the continent which had been named 'terre Adélie', French for Adélie Land, itself named for Dumont d'Urville's wife, Adèle. Jacques Bernard Hombron and Honoré Jacquinot, two French surgeons who doubled as naturalists on the journey, described the bird for science in 1841, giving it the scientific name Catarrhactes adeliæ. The first Adélie penguin specimens were collected by crew members of French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville on his expedition to Antarctica in the late 1830s and early 1840s.
