Brown Penguins ?! 36 million years old!!! Current Events #3

This article involves a giant penguin with differently-colored feathers – an extinct one. A fossil giant penguin was found recently – studies show that the fossil is 36 million years old! The skeleton found includes a pretty big portion of the body with the skull and flipper, but the best find overall are the fossilized feathers. They were so well preserved that scientists were able to examine the feathers and look at the pigmented nubbins (called melanosomes) that give the plumage its color. This penguin, dubbed the Inkayacu Paracasensis, is about twice of today’s emperor penguins weight and stretched almost 1.5 meters while swimming! However, the most interesting discovery from this fossil is that the ancient penguins wore hues of soft grays and reddish browns, as opposed to wearing the formal “tux” that penguins adorn themselves with today. This discovery was made in Peru, and quite recently, too. Scientists all over the world have been studying it in hopes of understanding more about how the penguins had evolved from flying birds to swimming birds – unfortunately with nearly no luck. From the flippers, scientists have worked out that at this point in time, the birds were already built as swimmers, not as fliers.

This was very interesting to me because I had always thought of penguins as black and white swimming birds. I never really thought about how they had to evolve from flying birds to swimming birds and how their color was once different too. Also, one part of the article that was really interesting was the part describing the melanosomes. According to research, the melanosomes in the penguins’ flippers help them withstand the pressure from the water, because water is 800 times denser than air. This helped me understand more about the cycle of how animals become who they are today, and this has a lot to do with adaptations. At some point in time very long ago, these penguins were probably built in a different way. However, because this way was probably not the best way for them to survive, they slowly evolved over millions of years to what they are now.