The story
The oldest known penguin is Waimanu manneringi, described in 2006 by Claudia Slack and colleagues from the Waipara Greensand of Canterbury, New Zealand, and dated to about 61 million years ago. It stood about 80 centimetres tall. Its wing bones were already flattened and stiff, like a flipper, so it could not fly but could dive and chase fish and squid. The name means water bird in Maori.
Penguins evolved from flying seabirds in the southern oceans, and they appear just a few million years after the asteroid impact removed mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and many other marine hunters. Wings that beat in water are efficient swimmers but poor for air, so flight was lost early and for good. Later fossils show a burst of size: Kumimanu from New Zealand was nearly 1.8 metres long and heavy, and Icadyptes from Peru was about 1.5 metres tall, with a long spear-like bill. These giants lived in warm seas and disappeared as the oceans cooled and seals and toothed whales became common.
Why it mattered
- Penguins show that birds rapidly colonized the sea once marine reptiles were gone.
- Their flipper-wing design is a textbook case of an animal trading one kind of locomotion for another.
- Giant fossil penguins record the warm Eocene southern seas that later chilled when Antarctica froze.
Sources
- Mannering's penguin New Zealand Birds Online
- First penguins from 'just after' the big extinction Fossil Treasures of the Geology Museum
- Giant prehistoric penguins once swam off the coast of New Zealand WGBH
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