The second ancient penguin, dubbed Petradyptes stonehousei, is much smaller sized, tipping the scales at “simply” 50 kgs (110 pounds). However thats still much heftier than an adult Emperor which weighs between 22 and 45 kg (49 and 99 pounds).
A very large penguin is capable of recording larger victim, providing more precious calories. The scientists believe that the ancient extinct penguin was likely able to reach much deeper waters and discover food that isnt accessible to living penguins.
” Many early fossil penguins attained enormous sizes, quickly dwarfing the largest penguins alive today. Our brand-new types, Kumimanu fordycei, is the biggest fossil penguin ever found– at around 350 pounds, it would have weighed more than Shaquille ONeal at the peak of his supremacy!”
Some more about the huge fossil penguin Kumimanu fordycei. One of the cool ideas @NZfauna had was to laser scan the bones.
The rocks in which the fossils were discovered framed are believed to be around 57 million years old, which positions the two penguins less than 10 million years after the horrible end-Cretaceous mass termination when a giant asteroid erased all non-avian dinosaurs. A parish of thousands of these huge penguins on New Zealands beaches should have been truly a sight to behold.
Both sets of fossils were discovered somewhat by accident, while New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Curator Alan Tennyson was out on the beach on a fossil collection journey in between 2016 and 2017. Tennyson later fastidiously got rid of the rock to reveal the fossilized bounty inside the stones, consisting of 9 partial penguin skeletons.
Just because it was large, that doesnt mean that Kumimanu fordycei was any slouch. Similar to Shaq was enormous yet agile on the basketball court, Kumimanu fordycei was most likely capable of water slam dunks of its own.
For many years, the group utilized laser scanners to create high-resolution digital designs of the fossils, which they used to compare them to other extinct ancient bird species and modern penguins. Hundreds of modern-day penguin bones were thoroughly determined, and this data was then fed into a Bayesian analytical design in order to approximate the size of Kumimanu fordycei and Petradyptes stonehousei.
Life restorations of Kumimanu fordycei and Petradyptes stonehousei. Credit: Simone Giovanardi.
Among the 57-million-year-old beach boulders of New Zealands South Island, paleontologists have actually recognized not one but two brand-new species of penguins– and thats not all. One of the penguins was rather the chonky young boy, weighing more than 150 kilograms (330 pounds), which is more than 3 times the size of Antarcticas emperor penguin, the biggest of the 18 species of penguin alive today.
Skeletal restorations of the fossil penguins Kumimanu fordycei ( left) and Petradyptes stonehousei ( center) with a modern-day emperor penguin (right) for scale. Credit: Dr. Simone Giovanardi.
This is our finest guess at height for Kumimanu fordycei (we have an excellent mass regression, but height is challenging without any leg bones so we did not approximate it in the paper). These cutouts will be available for selfies when we open the @thebrucemuseum Penguins show this spring! pic.twitter.com/ajRiYFCHGH— Daniel Ksepka (@KsepkaLab) February 8, 2023
” Fossils offer us with evidence of the history of life, and often that evidence is truly unexpected,” said co-author Dr. Daniel Field from Cambridges Department of Earth Sciences.
” When we start thinking about these finds not as isolated bones however as parts of a whole living animal then a picture starts to form,” said co-author Dr. Daniel Thomas from Massey University in Auckland.
This is our best guess at height for Kumimanu fordycei (we have a great mass regression, however height is tricky without any leg bones so we did not estimate it in the paper). These cutouts will be offered for selfies when we open the @thebrucemuseum Penguins exhibit this spring! Some more about the giant fossil penguin Kumimanu fordycei.
A really big penguin can recording larger prey, supplying more precious calories. Most notably though, a large body surface location is much more suitable for conserving body temperature, which can literally indicate the distinction in between life and death when you call freezing waters your house. The researchers think that the ancient extinct penguin was most likely able to reach much deeper waters and find food that isnt available to living penguins.