Nishad Karim
The Guardian, Monday 4 August 2014 17.39 BST
A penguin species that lived millions of years ago would have dwarfed today’s biggest living penguins and stood as tall as most humans, according to analysis of fossils by a team of researchers from the La Plata Museum in Argentina.
Palaeeudyptes klekowskii has already been dubbed the “colossus penguin”, and is the most complete fossil ever uncovered from the Antarctic. The unearthed bones are 37m years old and include the longest recorded fused ankle-foot bone as well as parts of a wing bone.
From those bones, researchers estimated the species would have stood 2m tall from toe to beak tip, and weighed as much as 115kg. Standing normally, beak down, the penguin would have be around 1.6m tall, the team reported in the journal Geobios.
By comparison, the tallest and heaviest living species, the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), stands 1.1m high and weighs just under 50kg.
Being of a larger build has its advantages, as bigger penguins could dive underwater to hunt fish for significantly longer periods of time compared to smaller species. A penguin the size of Palaeeudyptes klekowskii could stay underwater for up to 40 minutes.
How the giant penguin would have measured against humans
Source and more reads at the link:http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/04/giant-penguin-fossil-antarctica
