Scientists have unearthed in New Zealand fossil bones of what might be the heavyweight champion of the penguin world, a bird about 1.77m tall that thrived 55 million to 60 million years ago, relatively soon after the demise of the dinosaurs.
Researchers on Tuesday said that the ancient penguin, called Kumimanu biceae, weighed nearly 101kg and was much bigger than the largest of these flightless seabirds alive today, the emperor penguin, which grows to about 1.2m and weighs about 40kg.
The only ancient penguin yet discovered that might have been larger than Kumimanu is known only from a leg bone, said ornithologist Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt in Germany.
Photo: AP
“Gigantism in penguins evolved more than once,” Mayr said.
Kumimanu, named after a creature from Maori folklore and the Maori word for bird, is the second-oldest known penguin. The older one, also from New Zealand, was 61 million years old.
Kumimanu’s partial skeleton lacks the skull.
Mayr said other fossils indicate that the earliest penguins possessed much longer beaks than their modern relatives, useful for spearing fish.
“It would have been very impressive: as tall as many people and a very solid, muscly animal built to withstand frequent deep dives to catch its prey,” said Alan Tennyson, vertebrate curator at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Nature Communications.
“It would not have been the kind of bird that someone could catch alive. It would have been considerably more powerful than a person,” he added.
Kumimanu and other early penguins had already developed typical penguin features including flipper-like wings and an upright stance.
Studies suggest early penguins were brownish, not the trademark black and white of today’s penguins, Mayr said.
Penguins are thought to have evolved from a flying ancestor perhaps resembling a cormorant, Mayr said.
The asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago also eliminated the large marine reptiles that dominated the seas, clearing the way for fish-eating divers like penguins.
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Residents across Japan’s Pacific coast yesterday rushed to higher ground as tsunami warnings following a massive earthquake off Russia’s far east resurfaced painful memories and lessons from the devastating 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster. Television banners flashed “TSUNAMI! EVACUATE!” and similar warnings as most broadcasters cut regular programming to issue warnings and evacuation orders, as tsunami waves approached Japan’s shores. “Do not be glued to the screen. Evacuate now,” a news presenter at public broadcaster NHK shouted. The warnings resurfaced memories of the March 11, 2011, earthquake, when more than 15,000 people died after a magnitude 9 tremor triggered a massive tsunami that
RSS