March of the Fossil Penguins

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers! For those of you who would like to bring penguins to your holiday table, here are some adorable hors d’oeuvres made from olives, cream cheese, carrot slices, and red pepper for the jaunty bow ties.

Thanks to Once Upon A Plate for the recipe, and to my mother-in-law for the snacks and photo!

Following up last week’s post on a humorous mistaken “discovery”, this post revisits a bizarre misinterpretation of the fossil record. Patagonia is a land rich in fossils of all kinds, from giant sauropod dinosaurs to the tank-like armored mammalian glypotodons.  Most of these fossils are found in terrestrial deposits, but near the coast ancient marine rocks preserve a wealth remains from sea-going creatures, including a diverse set of penguins.  Sediments dating to about 20 million years ago are the main penguin bearing deposits, and the most common fossils belong to Palaeospheniscus.  The famed Paraptenodytes also lived in this region.

One of the major follies in penguin paleontology was the naming of Palaeoapterodytes ictus in 1905 by the famous Argentine paleontologist Florentino Ameghino.  The name means ancient wingless diver.  Only a single bone was used to name the species, a humerus (the main bone of the flipper).  The bone lacked is distal end, leaving Ameghino to surmise that the species had evolved towards extreme reduction of the flipper, leaving only a tiny stub of bone.  Flightless birds have reduced their wings many, many times over the course of evolutionary history.  However, penguins aren’t truly flightless when one considers that they “fly” through the water using their flippers just like volant birds fly through the air with their wings.  A wingless penguin would be an awkward fellow indeed.  I’d assume such a creature would be restricted to hopping around on the shore and perhaps making one good leap into the ocean before floating away like a buoy with no way to control itself. 
In reality, the bone was just damaged.  Lambrecht pointed this out in his 1933 monograph on fossil birds of the world. George Gaylord Simpson, in the days when scientists were permitted to write in a more engaging voice, wrote of Palaeoapterodytes ictus “based on a manifest error, the name might best be quietly forgotten.” Still, it is interesting to imagine what such a penguin may have looked like….

A chinstrap penguin modeled into Palaeoapterodytes with the help of photoshop

Today we have largely settled on 19 species in our attempts to classify the living penguins.  New fossil species are found every year, but it has been a very long time since a new species of living penguin was found.  In the late 1700s and early 1800s, when most penguin species were formally given scientific names, the pace of discovery was faster and the race to name species resulted in some taxonomic slovenliness.

As western naturalists began to explore farther reaches of the oceans, more penguin species were added to the scientific catalog of species, but some species were named more than once.  In fact, some were named a dozen times or more! Naturalists “rediscovering” a penguin species already known to science may have thought they had come upon a new species because they were unaware of the published record, which was much more difficult to keep abreast of in a time without internet searches or even  telephones, or because they mistook  males and females, or young and old birds, or breeding and non-breeding birds for separate species.  The King Penguin was officially entered into the scientific literature as Aptenodytes patagonicus in 1778.  Latecomers attempted to dub King Penguins with such monikers as Aptenodytes longirostris, Aptenodytes patachonica, and Aptenodytes pennant over the next few decades.  Perhaps the strangest name was Penguinarium patachonica – the genus name sounds more like a wondrous bubble-domed penguin-themed park than an animal.  The King Penguin also missed out on having the envy inspiring name “A-rex” when Aptenodytes rex was suggested (almost a century late to the table) by the Charles Bonaparte, an ornithologist who happened to be cousin to Napoleon III.

My favorite story of discovering the already known is that of Latham’s Woolly Penguin.  Explorers happened upon a creche or juvenile King Penguins in the 1800s, during the phase in the species reproductive cycle when all the adults have left the colony to replenish themselves at sea while the juveniles stand about on the shore and survive for several weeks off fat stores.  Apparently these juveniles were mistaken for a new species.  Certainly they look very different than the adults – more like big brown bags of leaves than tuxedoed penguins.   If you stop to think about it, however, this imagined species biology must have seemed strange.  What were all these penguins eating on their little scrap of wind-blown island?  Bugs? Pebbles? Sand?  It must have been something, given the juveniles can weigh more than the adults at the start of their fasting phase.  And why had they lost flight but not gained seaworthiness?  I’m not sure if these questions intrigued Latham as he jotted down the entry for the Woolly Penguin in his book.

A juvenile and adult King Penguin. Photo from flick: http://bit.ly/j2B8yg

Of course, it was only a matter of time before the error was recognized, and Woolly Penguins are no longer counted when penguin species role calls are taken.  King Penguins still retain a diverse wardrobe of names in common speech – many languages have their own non-scientific name for King Penguins, and some are quite delightful: for example Königspinguin (German), Kongepingvin (Danish), Rí-phiongain (Gaelic) and Le Manchot Royal (French). 

References:

Latham J. 1821. General History of Birds. London: Winchester,
Jacob and Johnson.

Several posts ago, we talked about penguin molting strategies.  One of the interesting things about penguin molts is that they shed all their feathers rapidly over the course of two or three weeks, rather than gradually throughout entire the year.  But, that doesn’t mean that penguins drop all their feathers and wait about naked while they wait for new ones to grow in.  During the molt period, the new feathers push the old feathers out as they emerge from within the skin.  This way, new feathers are ready to go by the time the old ones fall off.  At least, most of the time.

Ralph is a Humboldt Penguin (Spheniscus humboldti) at the Marwell Wildlife center in the UK.  Probably due to some type of genetic problem, Ralph sheds all his old feathers before the new ones emerge during molt season.  This poses a big problem because his pink penguin hide could be burned to a crisp in the sun without protection.  The zookeepers came up with an innovative and somewhat comical solution – a penguin wetsuit.  Ralph gets zipped into a miniature jacket made from the leg of  human wetsuit until his new feathers grow in.  Apparently the other penguins in the enclosure were baffled at first but shortly thereafter accepted him back into the group.

Ralph the penguin gets ready for a swim.

You can watch a short video of Ralph here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1206290/Featherless-Ralph-penguin-swim-things-getting-new-wetsuit.html

Some of our favorite fossil and living penguins have dressed in their Halloween costumes for you – or the children in your life – to print and color. Click here to download a pdf!

(Be sure to have the “scale to printable area” option selected when you print this file.)

Sir Nils Olav may not be a household name in the United States, but he is undoubtedly the most highly honored penguin in the world.  While other penguins toil away in obscurity as zoo attractions or mascots, Sir Nils Olav has risen all the way to the rank of Colonel-in-Chief of the Norwegian King’s Guard.  Fittingly, this bird is a member of the species Aptenodytes patagonicus - a King Penguin.  This species is the second largest today and is known for both its stature and its stately orange markings.

Sir Nils Olav reviews the King's Guard (note decoration of kinghthood on flipper)

This current Sir Nils Olav is actually the third in a line of Nils Olavs, all serving in the King’s Guard.  The first was adopted by the King’s Guard during a visit to the Edinburgh Zoo in 1972.  Each new Nils Olav inherited the rank of its predecessor.  These three penguins worked their way up the ranks, starting as a Corporal and receiving several promotions (to Sergeant, Regimental Sergeant Major, and Honourable Regimental Sergeant Major),  the most recent honor being the bestowal of knighthood upon the current incarnation in 2008, in front of 130 guardsmen and a crowd of hundreds of spectators. King Harald V approved the honor, citing the outstanding service and good conduct of the penguin.

None are fossil penguins, but this is too good not to share:

Happy Valentines Day from a non-fossil penguin.