Blowing away the idea that penguins came north from Antarctica about ten million years ago, a group of fossils found in the Peruvian desert put their comical little bods in warm climates around 35 million years ago.

Except that “comical little bods” would not be the way the rest of the ecology would probably think of them. The largest new species, Icadyptes salasi, was five feet tall, with a thick neck, strong muscles, a long hammerlike skull and a seven inch pointy beak rather like a heron. As in zap, poke, wriggle, scarf…

As Livescience points out, penguin insulation is so efficient they are in grave danger of overheating. Their little nude feet dump excess heat -

“A little biological ingenuity keeps the extremities from icing over. Certain arteries in the penguin leg can adjust blood flow in response to foot temperature, feeding the foot just enough blood to keep it a few degrees above freezing. Not that all species need such a system—on the equator, Galápagos penguins contend with sweltering sun and heat with much help from their cool feet.”

The size is a puzzle. The climate was actually much hotter than now; large size is usually an adaptation against cold; the species had died out two million years before the Antarctic ice cap had even formed. New Scientist asked the obvious questions:

“We don’t know how the large penguins would have thermoregulated on land,” says Julia Clarke of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, US, who worked with Urbina to analyse the fossils. They probably spent most of their time in the water, she says.”

It turns out that this is not actually the largest penguin species that ever lived. According to Wikipedia:

“Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi, or Nordenskjoeld’s Giant Penguin, was a penguin species that lived 45–37 million years ago, during the Late Eocene and the earliest part of the Oligocene. It reached 1.7 metres in height and 90 kilograms in weight. Fossils of it have been found on Seymour Island off the coast of Antarctica and in New Zealand.”

The fattest was the New Zealand Giant Penguin, whose fossil was discovered by a group of schoolkids last year. It weighs in at one hundred kilos.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 10:52 pm and is filed under science, strangely compelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.