Daniel Ksepka, PhD, is the Curator of Science at the Bruce Museum. Ksepka earned his PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Columbia University in 2007 and spent five years in residence at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he performed his dissertation research on the fossil record of penguins and gained broad experience in the curation and study of natural history objects including fossils, skeletal materials, skins and geological specimens.

Over the next couple posts, Daniel will share information about prehistoric penguins. Learn more about penguins, their ancestors, their physiology and their biology. Visit the Aquarium! Keep reading for more about the first penguins in South America's fossil record.

South America welcomed its first penguin visitors about 40 million years ago, roughly 15 million years after as our flippered friends established themselves in Antarctica. The oldest fossils from this continent were discovered in Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of the landmass. Looking back at the geological record, this is not surprising. During the Eocene Epoch, South America was much further South then it is today. The swim from the Antarctic Peninsula to Tierra del Fuego would have been an easy journey for penguins.

Penguins quickly progressed north on both coasts, and fossils have been discovered in Peru, Chile, and Argentina recording their past diversity. In fact, they soon reached latitudes of 14°S in Peru, well within the tropics. Early subequatorial penguins soaked up rays on the beaches of a “Greenhouse Earth” during the Eocene, at a time when global sea surface temperatures averaged more than 5°C (~10° F) higher than today. Several unusual types of penguins thrived in this region. Roughly 34 million years ago, a spear-billed penguin called Icadyptes salasi prowled the coast.  This species was able to impale its prey with a long, straight, reinforced beak unlike any modern penguin.

Fossil skull of the spear-billed penguin Icadyptes salasi with a modern Humboldt penguin for scale

Today, mainland South America hosts more unimposing penguins, included the banded Humboldt penguin and Magellanic penguin, and the crested macaroni penguin and Southern rockhopper penguin. (The last of these can be seen at the New England Aquarium today!) These species are important predators of small fish and other marine life, but penguins as a whole seem to have relinquished part of their former role in the ecosystem to marine mammals like seals and sea lions in the modern day.

Silhouettes of a modern Humboldt Penguin and the extinct "bobble-headed" Spheniscus urbinai to the same scale.

By request of my image providers, the standard conditions are: one time single use, with no transfer of copyright. 

Daniel Ksepka, PhD, is the Curator of Science at the Bruce Museum. Ksepka earned his PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Columbia University in 2007 and spent five years in residence at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he performed his dissertation research on the fossil record of penguins and gained broad experience in the curation and study of natural history objects including fossils, skeletal materials, skins and geological specimens.

Over the next couple posts, Daniel will share information about prehistoric penguins. Learn more about penguins, their ancestors, their physiology and their biology. Visit the Aquarium! Keep reading for more about the first penguins in the fossil record in Antarctica.

Antarctica was the first point of expansion for penguins. However, this was not the Antarctica we know today. There were no permanent ice sheets covering the continent, and forests spread over the land. Mountains rose over lakes and rivers, and vast plains spread over areas that today lie silently under tremendously thick layers of ice. Sometime around 55 million years ago, shortly after penguins appeared in New Zealand, they expanded their range and reached this forested Antarctica. Soon, an incredible diversity of penguins was gathering along the coast at Seymour Island on the Antarctic Peninsula, which was once the site of an estuary.

A gathering of penguins along the shoreline in Eocene Antarctica, with contemporary plants and animals. Artwork © Martin Chavez.

It is sometimes difficult to tell whether two different sized bones belong to separate species or represent the male and female of the same species. In the case of Antarctica, even the most conservative counts would indicate 8 species lived side by side, and the true total may have reached 12 or more at the height of their diversity during the Late Eocene (roughly 35 million years ago). These ranged from “normal” penguins close in size to the modern Antarctic Adélie Penguin all the way up to giant species like Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi (a name meaning Nordenskjöld's man-bird, referring to both an Antarctic explorer and the enormous size of the bird).

A fossil beak fragment from a giant Antarctic penguin compared to the skull of a  King Penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus). Photo © Dr. Piotr Jadwiszczak.

Over time, Antarctica began to cool as it was placed in a freezer by changing ocean circulation patterns.
Australia and South America, once connected to Antarctica, drifted further north opening a deep seaway. Surrounded on all sides by a powerful clockwise circulating current, Antarctica was cut off from warmer ocean waters and entered an icebound phase. Penguins today call the ice shelves of Antarctica home, and even lay their eggs and raise their chicks on frozen sea ice. Yet, today's polar penguins are not direct descendants of the many penguin species that lived in Antarctica during the Eocene. Those species are all extinct now, yet we know precious little about what happened between the Eocene today. All we have to fill in the more than thirty million year gap are two bones deposited 10 million years ago on the east side of the continent and found during field work in the region.

Gentoo penguins | Photo © Brian Skerry

We know that penguins like the adorable Adélie and the regal Emperor eventually mastered the ice, but it will take further discoveries before we know when they arrived and whether any survivors of the warmer era where still hanging on to survival at that point.


By request of my image providers, the standard conditions are: one time single use, with no transfer of copyright. 

Daniel Ksepka, PhD, is the Curator of Science at the Bruce Museum. Ksepka earned his PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Columbia University in 2007 and spent five years in residence at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he performed his dissertation research on the fossil record of penguins and gained broad experience in the curation and study of natural history objects including fossils, skeletal materials, skins and geological specimens.

Over the next couple posts, Daniel will share information about prehistoric penguins. Learn more about penguins, their ancestors, their physiology and their biology. Visit the Aquarium! Keep reading for more about the first penguins in the fossil record.

Penguins have a remarkable family tree. Today, there are 18 officially recognized species of penguin spread throughout the Southern Hemisphere. Each of these species is unique, and together they span a wide range of sizes, ecologies, and preferred environments. Yet, these spectacular birds are only the most recent branches of the extended penguin evolutionary tree. More than 50 extinct species of penguins have been discovered in the fossil record. Paleontologists have learned many secrets of ancient penguin evolution from this rich fossil record. In this series of posts, we will take a look at the march of penguins across the southern seas.

It all started when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. Ornithologists have used DNA evidence to estimate that a group of ocean-going birds split off into two lineages sometime more than 66 million years ago. One of these branches gave rise to the tube-nosed albatrosses and petrels, and the other gave rise to penguins. These estimates would place the start of the penguin lineage during the Cretaceous Period, but at this first stage they were probably still capable of both wing-propelled diving and aerial flight, much like modern puffins. So far, paleontologists have not found any fossils to illuminate this first stage of penguin evolution.

Evolutionary tree showing the relationships of penguins to other waterbirds.

Fossil penguins appear on the stage in the Paleocene Epoch, the first phase of Earth history following the mass extinction that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. These fossils turn up not in Antarctica as some might expect, but in New Zealand. This is appropriate enough, as New Zealand is one of the hotspots of modern penguin diversity. The oldest penguin fossils that have been reported so far date to about 61 million years in age. They belong to a species called Waimanu manneringi, (a name derived from the Maori word for “water bird” and the name of Al Mannering, discoverer of the fossil). A smaller species named Waimanu tuatahi lived around the same time. Within a few million years, more species started turning up and New Zealand became a penguin paradise. Almost completely devoid of mammals, the region was a perfect breeding ground for birds that seek to evade land predators.

Life reconstruction of the early penguin Waimanu tuatahi. Artwork by Chris Gaskin, © Geology Museum, University of Otago.

Among the species that once swam the waters surrounding New Zealand were Kairuku waitaki and Kairuku grebneffi. Kairuku translates roughly to “diver who returns with food”, whereas waitaki references the region where the fossils were found and grebneffi honors Andrew Grebneff, who contributed to the collection and preparation of the fossils. These penguins would indeed have returned with great stores of food, as they were giants. Reaching heights more than a foot taller than living Emperor Penguins, Kairuku penguins would have cut regal figures on the ancient beaches. They were not alone, but lived alongside several smaller species, such as the roughly two foot tall Duntroonornis parvus. New Zealand has continued to host many penguins species through to the present, and today it is possible to find breeding Little Blue Penguins (Eudyptula minor), Yellow-eyed Penguins (Megadyptes antipodes), and Fiordland Crested Penguins (Eudyptes pachyrhynchus) on the mainland, as well as several other species of crested penguin on the outlying islands.

From their New Zealand stronghold, penguins were about to break loose. We'll watch the start of this expansion unfold in the next post.

Composite skeleton of a giant Kairuku penguin being examined by blog author Dr. Daniel Ksepka. Photo © Dr. R. Ewan Fordyce

By request of my image providers, the standard conditions are: one time single use, with no transfer of copyright.