They found fossils of the biggest penguin that ever lived

An international team of paleontologists presented in New Zealand fossil bones of two species of penguins recently described, one of which is said to be the largest penguin that ever lived, weighing more than 150 kgmore than three times the size of the largest living penguins.

The specialists the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), Massy University (New Zealand) next to the , Iowa State University, (USA) reported the discovery in the Journal of Paleontology. The paper’s lead author, Alan Tennyson, of Museum New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, discovered the fossils in 57-million-year-old beach rocks in North Otago, on the South Island of the New Zealand, between 2016 and 2017.

Then, thanks to the work of the team, the fossils could be exposed in the rocks. They have been identified as being between 59.5 and 55.5 million years old, marking their existence around 5 to 10 million years after the Late Cretaceous extinction that led to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs. The team used laser scanners to create digital models of the bones and compare them with other fossil species, flying diving birds like razorbills and modern penguins.

To estimate the size of the new species, the team measured hundreds of bones from modern penguins and calculated a regression using fin bone dimensions to predict weight. They concluded that the largest fin bones belonged to a penguin that tipped the scales with a staggering weight of 154 kilograms. By comparison, the emperor penguinslargest and heaviest of all living penguins, usually weighs between 22 and 45 kg.

“Fossils give us evidence for the history of life, and sometimes that evidence is truly startling. Many of the earliest fossil penguins grew to enormous sizes, easily dwarfing the largest penguins that exist today. Our new species Kumimanu fordyceiis the largest fossil penguin ever discovered: it weighs around 150 kilograms,” the co-author said. Daniel Field, from the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge.

The team named the new species Kumimanu fordycei after Dr. R. Ewan Fordyce, Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago. “Ewan Fordyce is a legend in our field, but also one of the most generous mentors I have ever known. Without Ewan’s field program, we wouldn’t even know there are many iconic fossil species out there, so it’s only fitting that he has his own namesake penguin,” the first author suggested, Daniel Ksepka, of Bruce Museum in GreenwichConnecticut.

Several specimens of a second penguin species were also found, providing a detailed view of the skeleton. nicknamed Petradyptes stonehousei, weighed 50 kg, meaning it was smaller than Kumimanu fordycei but still well above the weight of an emperor penguin. The name combines the Greek “petra” for rock and “dyptes” for diver, a game about the diving bird that is kept on a rock. Stonehousei pays tribute to the deceased Bernard Stonehouse (1926-2014), the first person to observe the complete reproductive cycle of the emperor penguin, a milestone in the biology of these animals.

These two newly described species show that penguins grew very large early in their evolutionary history, millions of years before they refined their finning apparatus. The team observed that both species retained primitive characteristicssuch as thinner fin bones and muscle attachment points resembling those of flying birds.

When scientists were asked why early penguins grew to titanic proportions, Ksepka speculated that it made them more efficient in water. “The size conveys a lot advantage. A larger penguin could take on larger prey and, more importantly, would have done better at maintaining body temperature in cold water. It is possible to break the 45kg barrier that allowed early penguins to spread from New Zealand to other parts of the world,” he said.

“When we started to think of these finds not as isolated bones but as parts of a whole living animal, then a picture began to form. The large, warm-blooded marine animals living today can dive at great depths. This raises questions as to whether Kumimanu fordycei had an ecology that today’s penguins do not, being able to reach deeper waters and find food that is not not accessible to live penguins,” continued co-author Daniel Thomas, from Massey University in Auckland.

Kumimanu fordycei must have been an absolutely amazing sighting on New Zealand beaches a long time ago. 57 million years old“and the combination of its large size and the incomplete nature of its fossil remains make it one of the most intriguing fossil birds ever discovered. Hopefully, future fossil discoveries will shed more light on the biology of this incredible primitive penguin”, concluded Field, who is also curator of ornithology at the Cambridge Museum of Zoology.

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