New Zealand's ancient penguin was as big as a human

Wednesday, 13 December 2017

Fossils of a giant man-sized penguin that once roamed New Zealand sat on a shelf for years before scientists started exploring their secrets.

The bones were found in a chunk of rock on an Otago beach in 2004. The creature measured nearly 1.77 metres long when swimming and weighed in at 101kg.

When standing, the ancient bird was maybe only 1.6m. The biggest penguin today, the emperor in Antarctica, stands less than 1.2m tall.

The newly found bird is about 18cm longer than any other ancient penguin that has left a substantial portion of a skeleton, said Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. A potentially bigger rival is known only from a fragment of leg bone, making a size estimate difficult.

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Mayr and others, including Te Papa's Alan Tennyson,  describe the giant creature in a paper released by the journal Nature Communications. They named it Kumimanu biceae, which refers to Māori words for a large mythological monster and a bird, and the mother of one of the study's authors. The fossils are 56 million to 60 million years old.

Vertebrate curator Tennyson was the one who found the fossil in the rock.

'This particular rock showed some bone on the outside surface so I picked it up and brought it back to work. At the time we did not have any hard rock preparators working for us, so the rock sat on a shelf for a few years. In 2015, preparator Al Mannering began working on the extraction.'

'Painstaking extraction work slowly revealed that the rock contained a multitude of jumbled bones of a colossal penguin.'

In total, 10 recognisable bones were revealed from a rock Tennyson could pick up in his hands.

A femur, tibia, ulna, humerus, sternum, scapula and vertebra were found. They comprised parts of the penguin's flipper, leg and body. 

Researchers compared the bones with other penguin skeletons to assess its size.

Other early penguins had large beaks and tended to be fish catchers. Tennyson said he'd guess that this penguin was the same.

Tennyson said given other penguin fossils had been found in the same area, it was 'quite likely' that with more prospecting, further specimens of the bird could be found.

'This bird would have died and sunk to the bottom of the sea and then been uplifted over millions of years.

'The Canterbury and Otago regions are incredibly rich for penguin fossils.'

Hundreds - if not thousands - of penguin fossils had been located in New Zealand - making it one of the world's penguin fossil hotspots.

It's nearly as old as the very earliest known penguin fossils, which were much smaller, said Daniel Ksepka, curator at the Bruce Museum of Greenwich, Connecticut. He has studied New Zealand fossil penguins but didn't participate in the new study.

The new discovery shows penguins 'got big very rapidly'' after the mass extinction of 66 million years ago that's best known for killing off the dinosaurs, he wrote in an email.

That event played a big role in penguin history. Beforehand, a non-flying seabird would be threatened by big marine reptile predators, which also would compete with the birds for food. But once the extinction wiped out those reptiles, the ability to fly was not so crucial, opening the door for penguins to appear.

Birds often evolve toward larger sizes after they lose the ability to fly, Mayr said. In fact, the new paper concludes that big size appeared more than once within the penguin family tree.

What happened to the giants?

Mayr said researchers believe they died out when large marine mammals like toothed whales and seals showed up and provided competition for safe breeding places and food. The newcomers may also have hunted the big penguins, he said.

- AP and Stuff