PREHISTORIC PENGUINS By: Mercy Back, UHM MOP Student
Many theories exist in the world of paleontology as to how the age of dinosaurs ended 66 million years ago. Some scientists say that a change in climate could’ve wiped out 3/4th of the life on Earth, but others argue it was a meteor impact that caused many dinosaurs to go extinct. But what exactly happened after the dinosaurs went extinct? New life emerged from every corner of the world, including penguins whose fossils were recovered near the Chatham Islands off the coast of New Zealand. This penguin called the Kupoupou stilwelli, Kupoupou, meaning ‘diving bird’ in Te Re Moriori, was a fairly large bird that is a distant relative of the King Penguins, which stand tall at 1.1 meters (about 3.5 feet). Paleontologists have not discovered any remains of penguins before the Cretaceous extinction, but these birds are hypothesized to be the one of the first ancestors of penguins who could not fly. Their skeletal structures imply that, like the extant species of penguins that we love and adore, they waddled on land, unlike some other fossils of penguins recovered from around that time period. The Senior Curator of Natural History, Dr. Paul Scofield, of the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand says that this discovery of these giant birds helps prove the hypothesis that penguins evolved rapidly after the mass extinction event occurred. K. stilwelli, the ancient ancestor of modern penguins, gives paleontologists more insight into the evolution of the world’s penguins and how the diversity of these species emerged. Dr. Scofield said to press “It’s not impossible that penguins lost the ability to fly and gained the ability to swim after the extinction event of 66 million years ago... If we ever find a penguin fossil from the Cretaceous period, we’ll know for sure.”
King penguins. By: laikolosse, Flickr.
MARCH 2020 |19
