Incredible news if you’re the kind of person who wants to be informed every time a fossil of a literal man-sized penguin is discovered somewhere in the world. A 55 to 60 million year old fossil of a man-sized penguin has been discovered on a New Zealand beach!
Fossil hunters found fragments of a fossil on what is now Hampden beach in Otago, according to The Guardian. The fossils suggest a penguin which weighed about 100 kilos and had a body length of 1.77m, making that a very large penguin.
“It would most likely have been slimmer too and not so cute looking,” said Gerald Mayr at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt. “It’s one of the tallest penguins that has ever been found.”
The tallest penguin currently living is the emperor penguin, which reach about 1.2m when fully grown. That’s still quite a big penguin.
This specific fossil was actually uncovered about a decade ago, but the rock holding the fossilised bones was so hard that they couldn’t actually determine much about the specimen.
But now they have. And now you know the truth: there was at least one big-ass penguin alive tens of millions of years ago. Aren’t you glad to know that?
