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Antarctica Was Once the Balmy Home of Six-Foot Penguins

The newly discovered Palaeeudyptes klekowskii was a big bird.
Image: Shutterstock

Seymour Island is one of the earliest places people found fossils, and it's the frozen island that just keeps on giving. This week brought a new study,  in the journal Geobio revealing that once upon a time, the island at the tip of the Antarctic peninsula was home to the biggest, heaviest penguin of all time.

These days, the average summer temperature on Seymour Island is around one degree above freezing, but that wasn't always the case. In the past, the island had a climate that was "kind of like the coast of Southern California," according to Syracuse University geology professor Linda Ivany . While today the water around the Antarctic Peninsula hovers around 30 degrees Fahrenheit, it used to be a relatively boiling 60 degrees during the Eocene epoch, e.g. from 56 to 34 million years ago.

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And on its balmy shores, between 10 to 14 species of penguins roamed. The largest of the penguins, according to the study, was the Palaeeudyptes klekowskii. From tip of the toes to beak, the big bird was over six feet long, and weighed about 250 pounds. Thanks to the penguin's slouchy manner of standing, it probably would've stood closer to 5 foot 3 inches or so, but that's still taller than any penguins waddling the Earth's surface today.

As Jeff Hecht wrote over at New Scientist , study co-author Carolina Acosta Hospitaleche found two big bones from a P. klekowskii on Seymour Island earlier this year. "One is part of a wing, and the other is a tarsometatarsus, formed by the fusion of ankle and foot bones," Hecht wrote. "The tarsometatarsus measures a record 9.1 centimeters."

In spite of its harsh climate, the Antarctic Peninsula is a treasure trove of natural history. Swedish explorer Otto Nordenskjöld was uncovering fossils from marine invertebrates on Seymour Island as far back as 1902. The peninsula is made of volcanic islands and the sediment from their formation holds fossils dating back to the Jurassic. Around 40,000 fossil specimens have been uncovered in the area, including 169 holotypes, the single type specimen that researchers use to define and describe a species. Seymour Island itself has a great cache of fossils from the Late Cretaceous Period, e.g. 90 to 65 million years ago, the Palaeocene after that, and, finally, the Eocene.

While there have been at least 17 fossilized penguins uncovered, Acosta Hospitaleche's dwarfs them all, even the emperor penguins of today, and will take its place in the Antarctic Peninsula fossil hall of fame, along side meat-eating therapod dinosaurs, armored dinosaurs, and the world's oldest duck specimen.