A new species of giant penguin - about 1.6 metres tall - has been identified from fossils found in Waipara, North Canterbury.
C. waiparensis is one of the world's oldest known penguin species and also one of the largest - taller even than today's 1.2 metre Emperor Penguin - and weighing up to 70 to 80 kg.
A team comprising Canterbury Museum curators Dr Paul Scofield and Dr Vanesa De Pietri, and Dr Gerald Mayr of Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, analysed the bones and concluded they belonged to a previously unknown penguin species.
Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, the team concluded that the closest known relative of C. waiparensis is a fellow Paleocene species Crossvallia unienwillia, which was identified from a fossilised partial skeleton found in the Cross Valley in Antarctica in 2000.
Canterbury Museum Senior Curator Natural History Dr Paul Scofield says finding closely related birds in New Zealand and Antarctica shows our close connection to the icy continent.
"When the Crossvallia species were alive, New Zealand and Antarctica were very different from today - Antarctica was covered in forest and both had much warmer climates," he says.
The fossil, a tarsometatarsus, left, is displayed next to a similar bone for an Emperor Penguin in Christchurch, New Zealand, Wednesday [Credit: Mark Baker/AP] |
C. waiparensis is the fifth ancient penguin species described from fossils uncovered at the Waipara Greensand site.
Dr Gerald Mayr says the Waipara Greensand is arguably the world's most significant site for penguin fossils from the Paleocene Epoch. "The fossils discovered there have made our understanding of penguin evolution a whole lot clearer," he says. "There's more to come, too - more fossils which we think represent new species are still awaiting description."
This illustration shows the approximate height of a giant penguin, a "crossvallia waiparensis" next to a human being [Credit: Canterbury Museum/AP] |
The fossils of several giant species, including C. waiparensis, will be displayed in a new exhibition about prehistoric New Zealand at Canterbury Museum later this year.
Source: Canterbury Museum [August 14, 2019]
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