Massive Penguins
By Hannah Welham
Colossal penguins and piña coladas may not be the most probable combination you’ll hear today but if holidaying in Latin America 36 million years ago was your thing then they might have been part of your daily life*.That is it would have been according to the recent research of palaeontologists Maria Urbino and Julia Clarke who have just uncovered the fossil of a 1.5 metre tall penguin, named Icadyptes salasi, off the on the equatorial beaches of Peru.
For those of you who have just as much trouble as me with your everyday metric conversion, a 1.5 metre-tall penguin is about the equivalent of your average five foot, vertically challenged human – pretty big by comparison with our friends (the penguins that is) at the zoo.
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However, none of our modern species, nor even this latest fossil come close to the title of largest ever penguin. That belongs to Nordenskjoeld's giant penguin, which reached 1.7 metres (5½ feet) in height and weighed in at 90 kilograms.
So what, I hear you ask, is so special about this Peruvian finding? Well, the clue really is in the title.
Nowadays the ranges of some of the smaller penguins extend up the Southern Hemisphere towards the Equator, but this would have been a mighty feat for such a large bird as Icadyptes at a time when global temperatures were even higher than they are now.
The modern understanding is that penguins use larger body size to keep in more heat. So it is, to put it frankly, quite baffling to find that one of the giants of the group survived at the Equator.
(*obviously this is subject to some slight technical hitches re the evolution of humans and piña coladas - see the evolution of pina coladas)
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More penguins to pass the time:
- Bizarre - Copaca-penguins
- Review - Why don't penguins feet freeze
Title image: Florian Engels
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