Scientists Discover Massive Species Of Extinct Penguin

[n2doc]

Palaeeudyptes klekowskii. The bones pictured here were previously published in C.A. Hospitaleche & M. Reguero, Geobios 2014


Colossal penguin bones from the extinct species Palaeeudyptes klekowskii have been discovered on an island in the Antarctic Peninsula. According to a new study published in Comptes Rendus Palevol last week, these newly uncovered bones belonged to a 2-meter-long behemoth, the tallest and heaviest penguin ever described.

Thomas Huxley discovered a genus of giant extinct penguins named Palaeeudyptes back in 1859, and four species have since been identified. Palaeeudyptes klekowskii, described in 1990, is the biggest of the genus, and it lived 37 to 40 million years ago. This was "a wonderful time for penguins, when 10 to 14 species lived together along the Antarctic coast," Carolina Acosta Hospitaleche from Museo de La Plata in Argentina tells New Scientist.

Penguins today range wildly in size, from the 40-centimeter (1.3-foot) little blue penguin to the 116-centimeter (3.8-foot) emperor penguin. But if you throw in extinct penguins, the range gets much, much wider. The tiniest penguin is Eretiscus tonni from Patagonia, about 35 centimeters (1.1 feet) in length and 0.94 kilograms (2 pounds) of body mass. And until now, the biggest penguin species on record was Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi, at 166.3 centimeters long (5.5 feet) and weighing 82.8 kilograms (182 pounds).

In this new work, Hospitaleche describes two new Palaeeudyptes klekowskii bones of “striking dimensions.” The tarsometatarsus (a long bone in the leg formed by the fusion of tarsal and metatarsal structures) and a fragmented humerus (the forelimb, or its wing) were collected at a Late Eocene site on Seymour Island in the Antarctic Peninsula.


Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/scientists-discover-massive-species-extinct-penguin

[eppur_se_muova]

1. But was it an electric penguin ? With tentacles ? nt

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

2. Now they need to figure out how to bring it back.

The true use of GM - bringing extinct species back to life

[starroute]

3. Giant cave-dwelling albino Lovecraftian penguins?

http://lovecraft.wikia.com/wiki/Albino_Penguin

The Albino Penguins (Aptenodytes albus) are a fictional species of penguin which appears in H. P. Lovecraft's 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness. The narrator, William Dyer, describes them as standing six-feet-tall, making them larger than even the Emperor Penguin, which in reality is the tallest and heaviest of all living penguin species. The modern Albino Penguins discovered by Dyer and Danforth in At the Mountains of Madness are concluded through sculptures to be descendants of archaic penguins bred by the Elder Things. When Antarctica became glaciated, the penguins retreated to a heated underground abyss, although years of evolution in these depths "destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits."

[Thor_MN]

4. Thanks for the nightmares...

Trying to escape linebacker sized penguins....