Fossil Whale and Penguin Researcher Honored

Recently my colleague Dr. R. Ewan Fordyce received a prestigious national award, the Hutton Medal.  The Hutton Medal is awarded each year by the Royal Society of New Zealand to recognize outstanding research in plant, animal or earth science.  Discipline rotates over a three year cycle, and this year was an “earth” year.  The medal is named for Captain Frederick Wollaston Hutton, an early supporter of Charles Darwin and describer of many species of New Zealand fish, invertebrates and birds. Among the past recipients of the award is Walter Reginald Brook Oliver, who wrote the seminal book New Zealand Birds.  He named the fossil species Pachydyptes ponderosus (probably the heaviest penguin ever to have lived) and was also the first to formally name the Snares Penguin (Eudyptes robustus).

It is very welcome news to hear that Dr. Fordyce has received this award, for no one has contributed more to our understanding of extinct penguins from New Zealand. Over the years, he has discovered and collected dozens of important specimens and authored papers on the species Waimanu manneringi, Waimanu tuatahi, and Kaiika maxwelli.  I had the distinct pleasure of working together with him on the description of Kairuku waitaki and Kairuku grebneffi. Although Dr. Fordyce has contributed heartily to the field collection and scientific study of fossil penguins, he is more widely known in scientific realms for his research on cetaceans. In the past, New Zealand was home to many unusual dolphins and whales, including primitive “proto-baleen” whales that still retained proper teeth, some of the most ancient baleen whale species, a pug-nosed dolphin, and menacing shark-toothed dolphins. You can read more about these wonderful seafaring creatures here. Many of these fascinating fossils impress children in museums and give paleontologists data to ponder thanks to Dr. Fordyce’s work.

So, a hearty congratulations is due.  It is not every day that one wins a medal with both a kiwi and a tuatara engraved upon it, and it is certainly a moment to savor.

Will the real Nordenskjöld please step forward?

Photograph of the Antarctica trapped in sea ice. From: Mill, H.R. The Siege of the South Pole.

Last post we touched on a fossil penguin that I incorrectly assumed was named after Artic explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld. As reader John Carlson kindly pointed out, the penguin is actually named after Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld’s nephew Otto Nordenskjöld.  Otto, also a polar explorer, sailed on the ship Antarctic. The ship was captained by Carl Anton Larsen, who incidentally also has a penguin named after him (Delphinornis larsenii).  In one of their adventures, Otto and his party were stranded on Snow Hill Island when the Antarctic failed to pick them up on the scheduled day – with good reason, having been crushed in ice. Larsen and the crew were forced to find themselves shelter on another island.  After enduring great deprivations (including, grimly from our point of view, a steady diet of penguins), both groups were rescued by the Argentine naval ship Uruguay.

A Fine Fossil Flipper

Seymour Island is located near the northern end of the Antarctic Peninsula. This prolific fossil site has yielded up a massive haul of fossil penguin bones starting over the past century. Thousands of specimens have been collected and there is evidence for about a dozen different species of penguins living side by side in the area roughly 40 million years ago.  One of the biggest species is named Anthropornis nordenskjoeldii. Anthropornis means “man bird”, referring to its massive size and “nordenskjoeldii” honors polar explorer ‪Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld.  Somewhat ironically for the honoree of a penguin species name, his explorations were primarily in the high North. Among other exploits, he collected fossils on the island of Spitsbergen.

One of the difficulties of studying the Seymour Island penguins is that despite the abundance of bones, almost all of them are isolated.  The area seems to have been an estuary, and the frenetic meeting of river and ocean waters may have worked to scatter penguin bones all around. I’ve looked at hundreds of specimens of Seymour Island penguins, and the only two specimens I have ever seen that include more than one bone are a “fossil knee” including the patella, piece of the femur and a piece of the tibiotarsus and a hip socket with a chunk of the femur stuck in it.  Isolated bones can be frustrating when there are multiple species that are the same size living in an area. How can we tell whether this sharp beak belongs to that wing?  How can can we tell whether the wide foot bone belongs to the penguin with the long neck bones?  It poses a particularly difficult challenge to efforts to understand fossil penguin locomotion, because we really want whole flippers or hindlimbs from a single bird if we are going to predict diving or walking style accurately.

As it turns out, a nearly complete flipper from Seymour Island has been known from nearly 60 years.  The great New Zealand penguin paleontologist Dr. Brian J. Marples studied the bones in 1953.  Marples was a very cautious paleontologist, and avoided naming new species or assigning bones to the same individual unless there was overwhelming evidence. He noted the bones all fit together, but gave them separate numbers and they ended up with their own little tags in the collection.  Flash forward to 2012.  Dr. Piotr Jadwiszczak at Uniwersytet w Białymstoku revisited the bones in a recent paper.  He found evidence from the preservation, siding, and proportions of the bones that they most likely belong to a single individual.  This lets us finally get a good idea how the flipper of Anthropornis was built.  Leg bones were recovered nearby too, and they probably also belong to this particular penguin.

Reconstruction of a wing skeleton of Anthropornis sp. (NHMUK A3348/3355, 3360[I]). Courtesy of Piotr Jadwiszczak who acknowledges financial support through SYNTHESYS funding made available by the European Community – Research Infrastructure Action under the FP7 “Structuring the European Research Area” Programme; project GBTAF-987.

The flipper is robust – very bulky compared to modern species. One of the strangest things about the flipper is that the tip of the flipper shows a “modern” plan, with the third metacarpal extending past the second (in essence, the bone that would make up the base of the middle finger in a person is longer than the bone that would make up the pointer finger). This advanced feature suggests that Anthropornis may have been more closely related to living penguins than previously thought, although other features of the skeleton would argue that it was very primitive.  A primitive feature of the flipper is the great angling between the bones, which results in a somewhat more auk-like wing as opposed to the very straight wings of modern penguins.  In the past, this angling has been connected to poorer diving capacities, but as Dr. Jadwiszczak and our own papers have noted this is not necessarily true.  Auks can reach tremendous depths, and they are at a disadvantage compared to penguins because of their higher buoyancy and less dense bones.  Anthropornis appears to have been a strong diver based on the flipper.

 

Reference: Jadwiszczak, P. 2012. Partial limb skeleton of a “giant penguin” Anthropornis from the Eocene of Antarctic Peninsula. Polish Polar Research 23: 259-274.

 

Happy Halloween from March of the Fossil Penguins

This year’s best costume award goes to Inkayacu in steampunk explorer mode.  Several years ago, while Julia Clarke and I were planning illustrations for the paper describing Inkayacu, the multi-talented  Katie Browne (artist and paleontology student) sketched a mock-up of the general shape of the penguin.  Sometimes, when you work too late fossil animals start getting jetpacks and top hats (it has happened before, I’ll admit). Here is the result:

Inkayacu may knock on your door this Halloween- make sure to stock up on anchovies and flying squid! Artwork courtesy of Katie Browne.

The Strangest Bird at Scientific American

In this month’s issue of Scientific American, Dr. Ewan Fordyce and I present a new article on penguin evolution.  I won’t spoil the story, but I will post a teaser of several fossil species brought to life with wonderful realism by artist Stephanie Abramowicz.  Astute blog readers may be able to pick out a few favorite species based on their sizes and shapes. If you want to guess each one, I will let you know if you are right in the comments thread. Thanks to Kate Wong for editing our article, and hope you all enjoy it.

Subscribers can check out the story at the Scientific American website. If you don’t have online access, please head to the newsstand to grab a copy.

 

A preview of the fantastic penguin reconstructions from our article. Art from a larger graphic by Stephanie Abramowicz, posted with permission from Scientific American.

Full citation:

Fordyce, R.E. and D.T. Ksepka. The Strangest Bird Scientific American 307, 56 – 61 (2012)

Killer Bobble-Headed Penguins!

Spheniscus penguins are your basic model.  Collectively, the four living species are sometimes known as “tuxedo penguins” for their striking color patterns, which resemble a tuxedo motif just a bit more than those of other types of penguins. These four species are among the most warm-weather adapted of modern penguins, and live in Africa, South America and the Galapagos Islands. Spheniscus penguins also have a really good fossil record, with lots of skeletons discovered in the past few years in places like Peru and Chile.  Many of these specimens are very similar to the living Humboldt Penguin (Spheniscus humboldti), which plies the coasts of South America today. However, two species stand out for their remarkable appearance.

Spheniscus urbinai and Spheniscus megaramphus were discovered in the prolific fossil deposits of the Peruvian Atacama Desert (also referred to a the Sechura Desert). These penguins appear to be standard, although slightly larger, versions of the basic Spheniscus plan from the toes up the neck.  Flippers, legs, vertebrae – all these bones are not easily distinguishable from the same elements in a Humboldt Penguin to the untrained eye.  The head, though, is a different story.  These two penguins have “bobble heads” – skulls that are proportionally too big for their body. Well, too big for a normal penguin’s body anyway – no one seems to have sent a memo to Spheniscus urbinai or Spheniscus megaramphus.  Aside from the big heads, these penguins had killer beaks.  The tips, instead of being straight like many fossil penguins or lightly down-turned like most modern species, were powerfully developed into a sharp menacing hook.  This is a style of beak often seen in aeriel predators like eagles and fish-snatching birds like frigatebirds.

Skulls of a “normal” Humboldt penguin (top) and Spheniscus megaramphus (bottom).

One of the basic facts about fossil bird beaks is that they tend to tell only half the story.  That is because the bony part of the beak is covered by a layer of keratin in life.  This sheath can greatly extend the tip of the bill in some species, and Spheniscus penguins are a perfect example.  The bony beaks of these birds have a modest sharp hook at the tip.  When the sheath is added though, the tips start looking pretty fierce. Adding the keratin layer to Spheniscus urbinai and Spheniscus megaramphus would rachet up the beak from menacing to downright scary. What were these fossil species doing with there intimidating beaks? Most likely catching tough prey.  A powerful hook  would be  well suited to ripping into fish and squid, and is more useful for holding onto a larger victim than gathering up tiny things like sardines.  Whatever their ecology, the bobble-headed Spheniscus species did not make it to the present day.  After splitting off from the main Spheniscus lineage around 6 million years ago, Spheniscus urbinai and Spheniscus megaramphus enjoined a few million years of successful hunting before vanishing.

A crude rendering of the body outline of Spheniscus urbinai with a living Spheniscus penguin for scale.

Fossil penguin…. poop?

Here at March of the Fossil Penguins, the fossils we cover are usually skeletons.  Sometimes, there are other types of fossil discoveries to discuss, including fossil eggs and fossil feathers.  Today, for the first time ever we will feature a story about fossil penguin poop.  Paleontologists refer to fossil droppings as coprolites, and they are no laughing matter. Coprolites can reveal a lot about an extinct animals diet and physiology.  Recently, a link between long gone penguins and freshly growing plants was uncovered in Antarctica, and the link was seemingly forgotten penguin waste.

A team led by Sharon Robinson, from the University of Wollongong in Australia, recently reported new data on a remarkable type of moss that grows in Antarctica in incredibly harsh conditions.  These plants can survive not only freezing temperatures and nearly total darkness during the winter, but also bombardment with UV rays that pierce through at the hole in the ozone layer which forms annually in over the South Pole.  These hardships may seem like enough to make any plant give up, but the mosses face yet another difficulty – nearly barren rock with no nutrients.  Yet onwards they grow. It turns out the secret source of nutrients is penguin poop.

Hardly Antarctic moss, photo by Prof. Sharon Robinson, University of Wollongong, Australia

How did the team figure out that the plants were using the penguin droppings for nutrients?  Animal waste carries a chemical signal based on diet.  One isotope that scientists can measure is nitrogen-15, which builds up to higher and higher levels as one moves up the food chain.  A tiny larval critter that eats algae will have a low concentration, but the sardine that eats that critter will have higher concentration, and the penguin that eats the sardine will have the highest of all.  This is because each “eater” absorbs the nitrogen-15 content of its prey and stores some of it. Analyzing a substance for chemical content can reveal its origin. In the case of the moss, nitrogen isotope data indicates they are gaining nutrients from a seabird source. Certainly the mosses are not eating the penguins, so droppings are the most likely substance

The kicker in the story is that there are no penguins living in the area where the moss grows today.  The last penguin colony in the area appears to have failed at least 3000 years ago.  Traces like nest pebbles show that Adelié penguins once bred in the area.  Even though penguins have not returned, their latrines have provided a food source for remarkably hardly plants for millenniums.   This study provides a great example of how animals can influence the environment over very long terms.

Coverage by the BBC is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18704332

Paraptenodytes is on Digimorph

Digimorph is a digital library of Computer Tomography (CT) datasets.  It is a wonderful tool for researchers and for people who just love morphology. Last week the fossil Paraptenodytes antarcticus scan was uploaded to the site.  You can see it here.   Digimorph lets users test drive a variety of imaging tools, so you can scroll through individual slices of the fossil skull, spin it around in three directions, and take a peek at different views of the virtual brain model.  Digimorph is packed with other great content too, including a variety of living penguin skull scans, dinosaur fossils, whole pickled animal scans and more.

Brain in Hand

Paleontologists today are lucky.  We have new tools that could only be dreamed of a few decades ago.  One of these is rapid prototyping, which allows us to create replicas of important fossils – or even models of structures that did not actually fossilize! In the case of the Paraptenodytes brain project, we were able to create an accurate physical model of the brain that can be studied, displayed, and shared with other scientists.  This is a great opportunity, because all we originally had was the skull.  Now, we have an endocast of the brain too, thanks to CT reconstruction. It is almost like creating a new “bonus” fossil.

How can this be done?  Rapid prototyping is basically 3D printing.  After loading up a digital file of the object to be printed, the prototyping machine builds the physical model layer by layer, using a nylon composite powder.  A laser is used to sinter the powder together. This means that the laser causes the atoms in the powder to diffuse across the boundaries of the particles, joining the layer together into a single piece without actually melting it.  A the end, we have an amazing model of a penguin brain.

A rapid prototype of a fossil penguin brain. Much more pleasant to hold in the hand than a real brain!

One of the great things about prototyping is that the files are digital, so they can be shared easily across long distances. I could transfer a copy of the Paraptenodytes brain files to a colleague in another country in a few minutes time and they could print one out in their lab. Another advantage of this technology is that unlimited copies can be made with no degradation – unlike the case of traditional molds, which slowly become less accurate with use due to wear and tear.  Finally, the prototypes can be made out of other materials besides nylon composites – stainless steel, ceramics, colored plastics and even silver are possible.  One day if I become a millionaire, I may treat myself to a solid gold Paraptenodytes brain.

Penguins at The Abstract

The Abstract is a blog that covers new research at North Carolina State University.  They cover really interesting stuff, like the physics of the Olympics and of course fossil discoveries by NC State paleontologists.  Today Tracey Peake wrote a nice article about our team’s brain research.  Check it out here:

http://web.ncsu.edu/abstract/science/printing-penguin-brains/