With 160 kilos of weight, it is the species of this largest flightless bird ever found
A penguin that weighed as much as a gorilla. This is how monstrous the recently discovered species was on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand and that has left scientists speechless. The fossil remains found are also extremely old: they date back to 57 million years ago. With almost 160 kilos of weightis the heaviest penguin known to science.
Alan Tennyson, a paleontologist at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, together with his son, discovered the bones of large seabirds in 2017. Now, after the studies carried out, all the details of that finding have been known, which includes three different species hitherto unknown penguins.
The remains were deposited on a beach known for its large accumulations of the so-called Moeraki boulders, large boulders that characterize this New Zealand coast. Thanks to the force of the tide, fragments of fossilized bones were discovered inside these rocks. Analyzing them, it became clear that there were three new, hitherto undescribed penguin species and one of them probably larger than any known member of the family of these cute flightless birds.
“Fossils give us evidence of the history of life, and sometimes that evidence is really surprising,” explains Daniel Field, from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “Many of the first fossil penguins reached enormous sizeseasily dwarfing the largest penguins in existence today”.
The details of these prehistoric giant penguins are described in the magazine Journal of Paleontology. Scientists named the largest penguin kumimanu fordycei. Kumimanu is the Maori word meaning “monstrous bird & rdquor;) and fordycei refers to Dr. Ewan Fordyce, professor emeritus at the University of Otago. The smallest penguin was named as Petradyptes (“rock diver”) stonehousei.
“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 that many iconic fossil species existed, so it’s only right that he has his own namesake penguin & rdquor ;, clarifies one of the researchers.
How was it possible to establish the weight of these giants? The researchers calculated the weight of the two newly discovered species based on the size and density of their bones compared to those of modern penguins by creating three-dimensional models. This way, P. stonehousei would have weighed around 50 kilograms, slightly more than the weight of emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) alive, while K. fordeycei he would have weighed more than three times this figure, up to a whopping 160kg.
It looks like, this unusual size gave them certain advantages in the water. “The penguins were so big that it made them more efficient in the water. A larger penguin could capture larger prey and, more importantly, would have better maintained body temperature in cold waters,” the authors write.
When the Chicxulub asteroid collision took place, about 66 million years ago, this catastrophe wiped out non-avian dinosaurs and mammals were still small and terrestrial. But with the disappearance of the giant marine reptiles, a gap was left which, it seems, the penguins also filled, growing to impressive size. The absence of major competitors gave the penguins plenty of room to grow. It is still unknown if there were even larger penguins or if the remains found correspond by chance to a particularly giant specimen.
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