The fossilized leg bones of a giant penguin that lived 61 million years ago have been discovered in New Zealand.
Artist’s impression of a group of Waimanu penguins on a beach in Paleocene Canterbury. Image credit: Chris Gaskin, Geology Museum, University of Otago.
The fossil was found by amateur fossil collector Leigh Love in the Waipara Greensand at Waipara River, Canterbury Province, New Zealand.
It was analyzed by a team of paleontologists from Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany.
According to the researchers, the new find is one of the oldest penguin fossils in the world.
“Together with the fossils of the recently discovered penguin-like bird Waimanu manneringi, the new specimens are the earliest published penguin remains,” they said.
The newly-discovered bird waddled the Earth during the Paleocene epoch.
It was about 5 feet (1.5 m) tall, making it almost as big as Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi (the largest known fossil penguin, which lived in Antarctica between 45 and 33 million years ago).
“Penguins had reached enormous proportions early on in their evolutionary history and were already more diverse 60 million years ago than we had previously assumed,” said team member Dr. Gerald Mayr, of the Senckenberg Research Institute.
“This diversity indicates that penguins probably evolved during the ‘Age of the Dinosaurs’ more than 65 million years ago.”
The foot bones of the new giant penguin (left), compared to those of Waimanu manneringi from the same fossil site (center) and an Emperor Penguin, the largest living penguin species (right). Image credit: Senckenberg Research Institute.
The bird’s bones differ substantially from previous penguin finds of a similar age and show that the variety of Paleocene penguins was greater than previously thought.
“The flattened and wide tarsometatarsus of the new taxon from the Waipara Greensand exhibits a much more derived morphology than the tarsometatarsus of Waimanu and clearly stems from a taxon that is situated more crownward than Waimanu in the phylogenetic tree of penguins,” the researchers said.
The new penguin presumably moved with the upright, waddling gait characteristic for today’s penguins.
“The newly-discovered bird walked differently from the cormorant-like gait of Waimanu. The larger penguin was already waddling like the penguins we see today,” said team member Dr. Vanesa De Pietri, from Canterbury Museum.
The paper describing the new species was published in the journal Science of Nature.
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G. Mayr et al. 2017. A new fossil from the mid-Paleocene of New Zealand reveals an unexpected diversity of world’s oldest penguins. Science of Nature 104: 9; doi: 10.1007/s00114-017-1441-0
