Three million years ago, an extinct relative of todays's great penguins — emperors and kings — lived in Aotearoa New Zealand.

We know this because our new study describes a spectacular fossilized skull of a great penguin found on the Taranaki coast.

Overall, it is 31% longer than the skull of an emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), which can be more than a meter tall and weigh upwards of 35 kilograms.

Compared to emperor penguins, however, the Taranaki great penguin had a much stronger and longer beak. It probably looked more like a king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus), only much bigger.

At the time, the world was warmer than today. But when the climate cooled, this penguin vanished.

We argue the cold wasn't to blame because crested and little penguins in New Zealand weathered the same change and remained. Great penguins shifted south and today live in the frozen wastes of Antarctica. So what drove their ancient relative to extinction?

The sediments that now form beach-side cliffs in South Taranaki were deposited at a time when global temperatures were about 3°C above those of the pre-industrial era. Fossils from this period are transforming our understanding of how biodiversity might respond to rising temperatures.

For example, Aotearoa was home to box fish and monk seals, both of which are still (sub)tropical species today. In a strange contradiction, they coexisted with great penguins — now only found in much colder climates — in ancient New Zealand.

The northernmost breeding colonies of king penguins today are around latitude 46.1°S in the subantarctic Crozet Islands, where seawater temperatures reach 3-10°C. From there, it only gets colder towards the higher latitudes where emperor penguins live.

Three million years ago, Aotearoa's great penguins extended as far north as 40.5°S, where South Taranaki was located then. They foraged in waters that were 20°C, much warmer than their relatives experience today.

This balmy existence ended with the Pleistocene ice ages around 2.58 million years ago. Ice extent and sea level shifted back and forward as temperatures fluctuated and ultimately ratcheted downwards. But why would such cooling eradicate giant penguins, which thrive under polar conditions today, from New Zealand?

Giant aerial predators

Fossil evidence for giant penguins in Aotearoa is limited and the exact reasons for their demise remain unclear. Even so, their sheer presence suggests they were less constrained by sea surface temperatures than previously thought. Another mechanism must be at play.

Up until about 500 years ago, Aotearoa was the hunting ground of the giant Haast's eagle and the huge Forbes' harrier. These were big raptors. They included large birds like moa in their diet. Their ancestors arrived from Australia inside the last three million years.

Based on what we see with living great penguins, the Taranaki great penguin almost certainly formed large exposed colonies along the coast. These could have been easy targets for a giant eagle or harrier hunting from the air.

By contrast, the smaller penguins still found in Aotearoa today have more cryptic breeding behavior. They nest in burrows, natural crevices and dense vegetation, and tend to cross beaches at night, which may have helped them avoid aerial predators.

Predation on land is just one hypothesis, though, to help explain why these penguins became extinct in the region while others survived. Other possibilities include changes in the marine environment.

We know that reduced food availability can be devastating for penguins, but it is challenging to see why this would single out the great penguins.

Importantly, our study provides new insight into the habitat tolerances of great penguins. Both king and emperor penguins today can withstand temperatures up to 20°C higher than those they usually forage in.

Three million years ago, their relative experienced such warmth. As the world continues to warm, we need to remember that the geographic range of a species can change as circumstances change.

The marine ecosystem of Aotearoa will move into the habitable zone of many new species, making investigations of the last warm period more important than ever before.

We would like to acknowledge our research co-author Dan Ksepka from The Bruce Museum, Kerr Sharpe-Young for discovering the fossil, and Ngāti Ruanui and Ngāruahine for supporting the collection and research of fossils from their rohe.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A rocket-like jellyfish, a majestic Komodo dragon and a dangerous surfing encounter are just a few of the stunning photographs captured by the finalists for the Ocean Photographer of the Year 2025 competition. The competition includes categories such as Impact and Hope, which have solicited breathtaking photographs that capture diverse forms of marine life and human interaction with the ocean.

The overall and category winners of the contest, hosted by Oceanographic Magazine and watch company Blancpain, will be announced in September. But all of the finalists' photos emphasize the need to protect the planet.

"In the midst of a deepening climate and biodiversity crisis on our blue planet, ocean photography has never been more important," Will Harrison, director of Ocean Photographer of the Year, said in a statement from the organization. "These images are far more than just beautiful; they are powerful visual testaments to what we stand to lose, and they remind us of the urgent need for protection."

Here are some of the gorgeous photos.

Synchronized swimmers

Photographer Yuka Takahashi, a finalist in the "Young" category of the competition, captured a pair of synchronized humpback whales in French Polynesia swimming through rays of sun. "These two humpback whales are always seen together, and I was fortunate to capture this rare moment of synchronicity," Takahashi said. "To me, this photo reflects the strong bond between them while also revealing their playful and curious personalities."

Warm bath

In this image, snapped by "Wildlife" category finalist and photographer Suliman Alatiqi, a Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) looms over an Indonesian shore. Because Komodo dragons are cold-blooded, they rely on cold water or mud to regulate their body temperature in the summer. They also travel across seabeds to search for food and mates.

Related: Ocean Photographer of the Year 2024: See stunning photos of hungry whale, surfing seagull, freaky fish babies, land-loving eel and adorable toxic octopus

Collateral damage

Photographer Natnattcha Chaturapitamorn snapped this image of fishers unloading their catches at a Bangladeshi harbor during sunrise, which is a finalist in the "Impact" category.

"Amidst this industrious energy, the presence of an endangered species serves as a reminder of the urgent need to protect marine biodiversity," Chaturapitamorn said. "As global fish stocks decline, safeguarding threatened species like this is vital, not only for ecological balance but for the long-term sustainability of fishing communities that depend on the ocean’s bounty."

Stranded

On July 1, wildlife veterinarians received a call about a humpback whale stranded on an Australian beach, and photographer Craig Parry documented the harrowing scene from above. For 15 hours, rescue teams and other members of the community worked to save the whale but were unsuccessful.

"While the outcome was heartbreaking, witnessing the collaboration and compassion shown by multiple agencies and volunteers was incredibly moving — a powerful reminder of what can be achieved when people come together with a shared purpose," said Parry, whose photo is a finalist in the "Human Connection" category.

School of fish

This mesmerizing image, taken in Indonesia by photographer Kim Hyeon Min, captures a school of juvenile fish circling around a tower of coral and is a finalist in the "Hope" category. The vibrancy of the coral suggests it has been unaffected by bleaching and is still able to host a miniature ecosystem for surrounding creatures. "In a time when marine ecosystems are rapidly disappearing, this image is a reminder of what we still have — and a hopeful glimpse of what we must protect for the future," Hyeon Min said.

Otherworldly jellyfish

Jellyfish are often described as alien-like, and this ethereal image captured in Spain by photographer Toni Bertran Regàs takes that comparison to new heights with this finalist in the "Fine Art" category.

"I've always been fascinated by the resemblance between jellyfish and space rockets," Bertran Regàs said. "I was looking for a photograph that conveyed that connection: a rocket leaving Earth. To do this, I used a fisheye lens and took the photo just as the sun was rising. Snell's Window" — an underwater optical phenomenon — "helped me create the Earth, the particles were the stars, and the sun luckily appeared behind it."

Monster waves

Photographer Ben Thouard, a finalist in the "Adventure" category, captured a day of rough seas in Nazaré, Portugal. Though the water was too dangerous for many surfers, two gave it a go. Despite the difficulty of photographing between huge waves and through salt water in the air, Thouard eventually shot this moment.

The Nazca people lived in a tropical desert on the southwestern coast of Peru between 100 B.C. and A.D. 800. So how did they know what a penguin looked like, and why did they honor one with its own ceramic pot?

This painted penguin pot is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was made about 1,600 years ago and was collected in Peru in the late 19th century. The multicolored ceramic vessel is 8.2 inches (20.8 centimeters) tall and has tiny, sculpted wings and a prominent bill.

The Nazca (also spelled Nasca) people are best known for their enormous geoglyphs — designs that are carved into the ground but are most easily seen from above. Hundreds of Nazca Lines have been discovered. They often depict images from the natural world, such as a cat, a monkey, a pelican and a killer whale. Experts don't know why the Nazca created these geoglyphs, as the culture left no written records.

Related: Monomachos Crown: The 1,000-year-old crown honoring 'the one who fights alone' found by a farmer in a field

But Nazca pottery also featured animals, people, mythical creatures and gods in unique, multicolored styles reminiscent of the geoglyphs, pointing to the importance of these creatures to their society.

According to the Art Institute of Chicago, this vessel is a rare depiction of the Humboldt penguin (Spheniscus humboldti), a species that lives along the Pacific Coast and is known for projectile pooping. The penguins can live along the Peruvian coast thanks to the Humboldt Current, which brings frigid water from Antarctica northward, chilling the tropical water. Humboldt penguins have thrived in Peru for centuries, but they are now vulnerable to extinction due to climate change and human encroachment.

The penguin vessel dates to a period when the Nazca were experimenting with realistic depictions of animals, including a lobster-shaped vessel and numerous examples of the "mythical killer whale." Although the orca — which features in ceramics, geoglyphs and petroglyphs — was clearly an important symbol to the Nazca, experts are unsure whether the penguin vessel held any special meaning or whether it reflects the Nazca's keen observation of the natural world around them.

A striking new satellite photo has revealed that the world's largest iceberg is starting to break apart into thousands of smaller pieces as it remains stuck alongside a wildlife refuge in Antarctica. But it could take months, if not years, for the entire slab to disappear.

The "megaberg," dubbed A23a, currently has a surface area of around 1,200 square miles (3,100 square kilometers) — roughly the size of Long Island. It first calved off of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1986, but it became trapped when its underside caught on the seafloor. It remained stranded until January 2023, when it finally began to move away from mainland Antarctica. During this time, it has repeatedly held the title of "world's largest iceberg" as bigger bergs have come and gone, most recently regaining the title in June 2023.

The giant iceberg became trapped again in early 2024 after getting caught in a large ocean vortex. It remained spinning on the spot for several months before eventually breaking free in December 2024 and resuming its journey north through the Drake Passage — also known as the "iceberg graveyard," where large Antarctic icebergs get swept away to their eventual doom.

But in January, it became clear that A23a was on a collision course with South Georgia in the Scotia Sea. By March, the megaberg came to a halt as it grounded on the seafloor around 60 miles (100 kilometers) off the island's southwest coast, where it became trapped for the third — and likely final — time in its lengthy lifespan.

Now, photos from NASA's Aqua satellite have revealed that the edges of A23a are starting to disintegrate, especially along its northern edge, blanketing the surrounding area with icy debris, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. "Thousands of iceberg pieces litter the ocean surface near the main berg, creating a scene reminiscent of a dark starry night," NASA representatives wrote.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

The numerous new icebergs appear extremely small compared with A23a. However, "many measure at least a kilometer across and would pose a risk to ships," NASA representatives wrote. The largest piece to break off from the megaberg, which has been dubbed A23c, has an area of around 50 square miles (130 square km) and is currently drifting south (just out of the satellite photo).

This type of iceberg disintegration is known as "edge wasting" and has shrunk A23a by around 200 square miles (520 square km) since it became stuck in March, according to NASA. At this rate, it will likely take several months, if not years, for the berg to fully break apart, assuming larger cracks do not rip it apart first.

However, A23a may not hold its size title for long, because as of May 16, it is only around 12 square miles (31 square km) larger than the next-biggest iceberg, D15A, according to the U.S. National Ice Center.

Wildlife refuge

South Georgia is not inhabited by people, aside from a few dozen researchers who visit throughout the year. However, it is home to an abundance of wildlife, such as seals and seabirds, including more than 2 million penguins, according to BirdLife International.

Having a large iceberg moored just offshore can be problematic for these species, especially for penguins that may have to travel several hundred extra miles around the obstruction to reach their prey, depending on where the iceberg is located. Meltwater coming from trapped bergs can also alter the temperature and salinity of their surroundings.

It is currently unclear how much of an impact A23a is having on the local wildlife. However, the iceberg is quite far off the coast, meaning it will be less disruptive than it could have been. Some researchers have claimed the melting slab could benefit the marine ecosystem by releasing nutrients into the ocean.

This is not the first time that South Georgia has been put under siege by giant icebergs. In 2020, one of the world's previous largest icebergs, A68, became stuck even closer to the island, sparking fears that it could disrupt penguin colonies. However, unlike A23a, it quickly broke up into dozens of sizable chunks after ocean currents ripped it in half, causing it to quickly melt away and thus averting disaster.

As human-caused climate change continues to cause increased melting of Antarctica's ice sheets, many more hefty bergs could soon pass by South Georgia in the coming decades.

"Secrets of the Penguins," a three-part documentary executive produced by James Cameron, is set to release this weekend, and according to the famed filmmaker, it takes observations of the charismatic birds "to another level."

The documentary, made by National Geographic, is hosted by wildlife filmmaker Bertie Gregory and narrated by Blake Lively.

The series presents a number of never-before-seen moments, including one teased in a viral clip of emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) chicks hurling themselves from a 50-foot (15 meters) cliff into the Southern Ocean.

"I don't think they wanted to be doing that, but that's how it worked out for them," Cameron told Live Science during a Thursday (April 17) roundtable interview. "They took a wrong turn somewhere along the coast and wound up having to base jump to get their first swim."

Related: Meet 'small diver': One of the tiniest penguins ever discovered

Capturing the series' footage was a monumental, globe-spanning undertaking involving over 70 scientists and filmmakers on a two-year trip. The stops along the way include the beaches of Cape Town, South Africa; the Galápagos Islands; Namibia's desert caves; and a 274-day stint on Antarctica's bitterly cold Ekström Ice Shelf, which is home to a colony of 20,000 emperor penguins.

It's not just penguins' remarkable hardiness that fascinates Cameron, but the social inventiveness needed to survive such inhospitable habitats. Another new behavior documented by the series shows a mated pair of emperor penguins moving an egg-sized chunk of ice between them in an apparent rehearsal for the real thing. (If eggs and young chicks leave the warmth of their parents' brood pouches for more than one or two minutes, they will die.)

"They didn't get an egg that season or it died, and so now they're doing training behavior to improve their odds," Cameron said. "Are we seeing what works strategically over millions of years for these guys to have adapted to being there on the ice?"

For many of the flightless, coastal birds, this resilience is being pushed to its breaking point. More than half of the 18 penguin species are endangered or vulnerable to extinction. The situation is especially bleak in Antarctica, where quickening climate change is melting the sea ice upon which emperor penguins and Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) live and outbreaks of the H5N1 bird flu virus decimate flocks.

This places penguins, in spite of their apparent remoteness, on the front lines of two global existential threats. If current trends continue up to 70% of emperor penguin colonies could disappear by 2050, with the species being doomed to extinction by 2100 — making it even more important to document them now.

"You can't study penguins without bumping up against climate change," Cameron said. But he added that "we try not to be too Cassandra about all that."

The goal of the series is to give a new generation of viewers a sense of wonder at nature, Cameron added

"And if we respect nature and we respect its wisdom about how these animals have learned to adapt and survive, maybe that will influence our behavior when push comes to shove," Cameron said. "I'd like to think that's the case."

As for the love of nature, what's Cameron's favorite penguin?

"The rock hoppers are great with their amazing hairstyles, but I'm fond of the emperors only because I've observed them personally," he said. "I was underwater with them, saw them rocketing around, saw their huddling behavior at 40 [degrees Celsius] below [freezing]. I guess I'm just drawn to the ones that I know."

"Secrets of the Penguins" premieres April 20 at 8 p.m. EDT/7 p.m. CDT on National Geographic. All episodes stream April 21 on Disney+ and Hulu. Disney Channel will also air the first episode on Earth Day, April 22, at 8 p.m. EDT.

Birds are often associated with flight, but not all of them take to the skies. Around 60 species — fewer than 1% of all bird species — are flightless, including ostriches, penguins and kiwis. These birds evolved from flying ancestors but lost their ability to fly, instead adapting to life on land or in the water.

But why did they give up flight? Why don't all birds fly?

The ability to fly is especially useful for escaping predators and traveling long distances in search of food and favorable living conditions. However, flight requires a lot of energy; birds burn about 75% more energy per day than similarly sized mammals do.

"If flight isn't necessary, birds can better survive and reproduce if they divert that energetic investment elsewhere," Natalie Wright, an associate professor of biology at Kenyon College in Ohio, told Live Science in an email.

In a 2016 paper published in the journal PNAS, Wright and her colleagues noted that island-dwelling birds, facing few to no predators and less competition for food and habitat, tend to evolve toward flightlessness.

"When living on an island without predators and without the need to migrate or travel long distances, for many kinds of birds the costs of flight outweigh the benefits," Wright said.

Related: Why do parrots live so long?

The shift to flightlessness leads to physical changes in birds. Over evolutionary time, their pectoral flight muscles shrink. The sternum (breastbone) with its central ridge (keel) — where flight muscles attach — also becomes smaller, Wright said. Wing bones — the humerus, ulna and carpometacarpus — become shorter and less robust, while their legs grow longer and sturdier as an adaptation to a more terrestrial lifestyle, she added.

Some birds have traded flight for superior swimming abilities. Penguins, for instance, retained their flight muscles and keel but repurposed them for swimming. "They use their wings to fly underwater," Peter Ryan, a professor emeritus of ornithology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told Live Science in an email. The flightless auk (Pinguinus impennis) also uses its wings to propel itself through water.

In birds that have been flightless for a long time, the long, stiff feathers needed for flight (flight feathers) disappear too, Ryan said. In some species, like kiwis and the Inaccessible Island rail (Atlantisia rogersi), the body feathers lose barbules — the tiny, hook-like structures that normally keep them aerodynamic — giving them a fluffier, fur-like appearance, Ryan added.

A 2025 study published in the journal Evolution found that flightless birds lose feather features in the reverse order of how they first evolved. The research also concluded that skeletal changes occur before changes in plumage, as it takes significantly more energy to grow and maintain bones than it does to maintain feathers.

Although flightless birds are uncommon today, fossils reveal that they were far more prevalent and diverse a few thousand years ago, Tim Blackburn, a professor of invasion biology at University College London, told Live Science in an email. However, the arrival of humans and animals like rats and dogs exposed these birds to predators.

"Having sacrificed their capacity to take to the air, there was no time for them to re-evolve this useful ability," Blackburn said. This led to the rapid extinction of iconic birds like the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) on Mauritius, the moa in New Zealand, and many others.

A 2020 study co-authored by Blackburn and published in the journal Science Advances found that there would be four times as many flightless bird species on Earth today were it not for human-driven extinctions.

The loss of flight happened at least 150 times in different groups of birds throughout evolutionary history, Ferran Sayol, first author of the study and a researcher at Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science in an email.

"Many of these species thrived on islands without predators but disappeared shortly after when humans arrived (due to direct hunting or introduced predators), making flightlessness seem rarer than it actually was," Sayol said.

After months on the move, the world's largest iceberg, A23a, has run aground off the remote British island of South Georgia, representatives from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) reported on Tuesday (Mar. 4).

The megaberg, which is roughly the size of Rhode Island, struck shallow waters 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the South Atlantic wildlife haven, the BBC reports, and researchers are keenly observing what it will do next.

"In the last few decades, the many icebergs that end up taking this route through the Southern Ocean soon break up, disperse and melt," Andrew Meijers, an oceanographer at the BAS, said in a statement. "It will be interesting to see what will happen now."

A23a, nicknamed the "queen of icebergs," first broke off from Antarctica's Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986. However, it remained tethered to the seabed for more than three decades before it finally began to break free in 2020, according to the BAS.

In 2024, the icy colossus then got stuck again, spinning in one spot for several months just north of the South Orkney Island. But in December 2024 it broke free once more and continued its journey northwards.

When A23a's trajectory towards South Georgia first became apparent in January, experts feared a collision could be catastrophic for the large colonies of penguins, seals and other marine wildlife that live there.

Related: 45-mile-long iceberg slams into penguin refuge in Antarctica, almost causing ecological disaster

If the megaberg stays grounded, Meijers said it is unlikely to pose a significant threat to the local wildlife. But if it moves closer to the island or breaks apart, "it could interrupt their pathway to feeding sites and force the adults to expend more energy to travel around it," he said. "This could reduce the amount of food coming back to pups and chicks on the island, and so increase mortality."

Similar fears were raised in 2020, when the previous world's largest iceberg, A68a, came perilously close to grounding right next to South Georgia before it was eventually ripped apart into many smaller pieces by ocean currents.

However, there could also be an upside to the recent iceberg grounding: "If the berg is stimulating ocean productivity, this could actually boost populations of local predators like seals and penguins," Meijers said.

As well as stirring up nutrients from the ocean floor, megabergs also contain a vast amount of nutrients locked away in their ice. "It's like dropping a nutrient bomb into the middle of an empty desert," Nadine Johnston, a marine ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey, told BBC.

However, Meijers added that, as the berg disintegrates, it might pose a threat to local sailors and fishermen. "Commercial fisheries have been disrupted in the past however, and as the berg breaks into smaller pieces, this might make fishing operations in the area both more difficult and potentially hazardous."

BAS will continue to monitor the effects of this iceberg on the surrounding ecosystem.

Little penguins "divorce" their partners to search for better mates, but they waste so much time wooing their new love interests that the colony suffers, a new study has found.

There's a common misconception that penguins mate for life — their breeding behaviors are more complicated than that and vary between species. Little penguins (Eudyptula minor) often return to the same mate every breeding season, but some ditch their partners to seek new mates, which scientists call a "penguin divorce."

The new study, published Jan. 11 in the journal Ecology and Evolution, found that these divorce rates are a good indicator of the colony's overall health. The team led by researchers from Monash University in Australia looked at how environmental and social factors, including divorce, influenced reproductive success over 13 breeding seasons on Phillip Island in Australia, which is home to 37,000 little penguins — the world's largest colony.

Divorce (or lack thereof) was the best predictor of reproductive success, with more offspring produced during seasons with low divorce rates, according to the study. But that's not to say committed couples were faithful.

"In good times, they largely stick with their partners, although there's often a bit of hanky-panky happening on the side," study co-author Richard Reina, head of the ecophysiology and conservation research group at Monash University in Australia, said in a statement. "However, after a poor reproductive season they may try to find a new partner for the next season to increase their breeding success."

Related: Meet 'small diver': One of the tiniest penguins ever discovered

Researchers believe penguins divorce for various reasons, including reproductive failure and environmental stress, which can all make penguin pairs less stable. In the long-term, separation can enhance reproductive success by allowing the penguins to find more compatible or "higher quality" mates, the study authors wrote.

However, problems arise for the colony when lots of penguins get divorced during the same season. Separated penguins must spend time searching for mates and engaging in courtship displays, which delays breeding. The study authors also wrote that there's a risk of "no breeding familiarity" and "reduced reproductive efficiency" during the early stages of a new coupling. In other words, new couples aren't as good at breeding and producing offspring as couples that have spent more time together.

Hundreds of divorces

For the new study, Reina and colleagues monitored a site called "Penguin Parade" on the west side of Phillip Island, where visitors can watch penguins waddle back from the ocean to their nests. The team documented almost 250 penguin divorces out of about 1,000 pairs included in the study, with higher divorce rates during less productive breeding seasons and lower rates during more productive breeding seasons.

The team found that other factors weren't as good or consistent at predicting reproductive success. The time penguins spent feeding impacted breeding, but in contrasting ways depending on whether the eggs had hatched, while environmental factors such as sea surface temperature had no significant effect during the study period. The authors noted that their results emphasize the need for an integrated approach to studying seabird reproductive success that considers individual behavior and social dynamics alongside environmental cues.

"Our results also suggest that monitoring divorce rates could offer a valuable, noninvasive tool for tracking reproductive trends in seabirds, particularly in populations facing fluctuating environmental conditions," the study authors wrote.

A tiny penguin that waddled, swam and dove around the coasts of southern New Zealand 24 million years ago is "key" to deciphering how living penguins got their wings, a new study finds. 

Researchers first unearthed fossils of the 1-foot-tall (0.3 meter) penguin back in the 1980s, but it has been an evolutionary enigma for decades, despite being one of the smallest penguins ever discovered. 

A team has now re-analyzed the fossils and found they belong to a previously unknown species called Pakudyptes hakataramea. Pakudyptes combines the Māori word "paku," meaning "small" with the Greek word "dyptes," meaning "diver," according to the researcher's study published Wednesday (July 31) in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand. 

The newly described species plugs an important gap in penguin wing evolution because its shoulder joints are very similar to those of present-day penguins, while its elbow joints are very similar to extinct penguins.

"Pakudyptes is the first fossil penguin ever found with this combination, and it is the 'key' fossil to unlocking the evolution of penguin wings," study lead author Tatsuro Ando, a curator at Ashoro Museum of Paleontology in Japan, said in a statement. 

Related: Largest penguin ever discovered weighed a whopping 340 pounds, fossils reveal

With a standing height of around 11.8 to 13.8 inches (30 to 35 centimeters), P. hakataramea was about the same size as the smallest living penguins — little blue penguins (Eudyptula minor) — and the smallest extinct penguins — Wilson's little penguins (Eudyptula wilsonae).

The P. hakataramea fossils consist of three bones collected from the Hakataramea Quarry in South Canterbury in 1987. The team used computed tomography (CT) scanners to create a virtual, 3D image of the remains and then compared them to those of living penguins, which allowed the researchers to finally place this new species on the tree of life. 

P. hakataramea had dense bones like living penguins, which would have been suitable for swimming and diving, according to the study. The hollow part of the bones — the medullary cavity — was also similar to little blue penguins, which typically spend time in shallow waters, so it may have done the same. 

Most fossil penguins are large, at around 3.3 feet (1 m), so this tiny penguin also helps researchers learn more about how penguins diversified between when it was alive at the end of the Oligocene epoch (33.9 million to 23.03 million years ago) and the beginning of the Miocene epoch (23.03 million to 5.3 million years ago). 

"Penguins evolved rapidly from the Late Oligocene to Early Miocene and Pakudyptes is an important fossil from this period," study co-author Carolina Loch, a senior lecturer in the department of oral sciences at the University of Otago, said in the statement. "Its small size and unique combination of bones may have contributed to the ecological diversity of modern penguins." 

Don't underestimate the tongue, a muscular organ that humans use for licking, breathing, tasting, swallowing and speaking. But this organ varies widely in color, shape, length and function across the animal kingdom. Whereas human tongues are pink and typically just over 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) long, the anteater has a 2-foot-long (60 cm) tongue and the blue-tongued skink has a brilliant blue one.

Here's a look at 20 amazing animal tongues and the science behind them.

Giraffes

If you've ever seen a giraffe's impressive 21-inch-long (53 cm) tongue, you'll know that it's not pink. Rather, the tallest living animal in the world has a dark-colored tongue that looks like a mix of purple, blue and black. That's because giraffes (genus Giraffa) tongues are covered with a lot of the pigment melanin, which acts as a type of sunblock to protect the licker while it reaches for tender leaves.

Giraffes have such long tongues that they can even use them to clean out their ears, according to Mental Floss.

Gila monsters

The Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum) lives up to the "monster" part of its name with its forked tongue. It's thought that the gila's forked tongue helps it smell in "three dimensions," meaning that the two tips can pick up the same odor and then distinguish the wafting chemical gradients in the air, which, in turn, helps the reptile zero-in on the location of the smell's source, Andrew Durso, a herpetologist at Florida Gulf Coast University, wrote in The Conversation. 

When the venomous lizard gets hungry, it flicks its sensitive tongue in and out, picking up chemical information about its surroundings. Then, the Gila monster's Jacobson's organ, a part of the olfactory (smelling) system in its nasal chamber, analyzes this information, letting the lizard know whether potential prey, such as small mammals, frogs, lizards, rodents and insects, are nearby.

Pangolins

As the only known mammal with scales, pangolins are weird creatures. Their sticky tongues are just as strange. The pangolin's tongue is connected not to the bottom of its mouth, but to the bottom of its ribcage. When it's not busy snatching up insects, such as ants and termites, the tongue hangs out in the pangolin's chest cavity.

When the pangolin's tongue is extended, it can measure up to 16 inches (40 cm) long, or longer than the animal's head and body combined, according to the BBC. 

Sun bears

"The tongue of the sun bear (Helarctos malayanus) is surprisingly long, measuring up to 10 inches (25 cm), according to Guinness World Records. This feature helps the bear channel its inner Winnie the Pooh; its lengthy tongue can extract honey from beehives, a trick that landed it the nickname of "honey bear," according to National Geographic.

Hippos

Much of the hippo's evolutionary history remains shrouded in mystery, according to National Geographic. Their giant tongues are no exception. In a 2010 study published in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers looked at the tongues of a young and old common hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius amphibius) with scanning electron microscopy and conventional light microscopy. (The 49-year-old female hippo's tongue was 24 inches (60 cm) long, while the 4-year-old male's was 18 inches (45 cm) long.) 

The team found that hippo tongues have features similar to a few types of animals: odd-toed ungulates (such as donkeys, which digest plant cellulose in the intestines, not the stomach), ruminants (such as cattle, which have four-chambered stomachs) and omnivorous, non-ruminant mammals (such as pigs, which have simple stomachs). 

Meanwhile, hippos use their three-chambered stomachs to help them digest grass. The animal's herbivorous diet and unique evolutionary history may explain "these mixed morphological features of the tongue," the researchers wrote in the study.

Penguins

Which tongue has more bristles than a hairbrush? It's none other than the penguin's.

The penguin's tongue does not have taste buds, but it does have loads of bristles made out of keratin, the fibrous protein that makes up human hair and nails. These bristles help the penguin grab wriggly krill and fish, according to the Smithsonian. 

Red-bellied woodpeckers

Woodpecker tongues — made of bone, cartilage and muscle — need to be really, really long so the birds can nab grubs hiding deep in trees. But a woodpecker's mouth isn't big enough to house that long tongue. So, what's the workaround? When it's not in use, the tongue goes into "self storage" by wrapping around the woodpecker's skull.

"The cordlike base of the tongue extends back out of their mouth on each side, winding behind and onto the top of their head, sometimes extending so far forward that it reaches the nostril," Larry Witmer, a professor of anatomy and paleontology with the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Ohio University, told Live Science. "When they need to unleash the weapon, the tongue basically unwinds from around the head to project into a crevice to capture its prey. It's a remarkable mechanism that's evolved independently in several kinds of birds, including hummingbirds."

You can check out this video of Witmer describing a red-bellied woodpecker skull and tongue. 

Tongue-eating parasites

This technically isn't a real tongue; it's a parasite that destroys a fish's tongue and then becomes a "substitute" tongue. In other words, this bug-like creature (Cymothoa Exigua) is a tongue-eating parasite. 

After the parasite enters through the fish's gills, it latches onto the tongue with its seven pairs of legs and (brace yourself) begins to feed on the tongue like a vampire. Soon, the tongue withers and drops off, but the parasite remains, masquerading as the fish's new tongue.

Lions

Just like other cats, the mighty lion (Panthera leo) uses its tongue to groom its fur. Feline tongues are very effective combs; they're covered with tiny spines known as papillae, which are sharp, hollow and curved backward toward the cat's throat, according to a 2018 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These spines help the cat deliver cleansing saliva to its fur, which later cools the cat as it evaporates. 

Cats don't care whether their prey tastes sweet, however. Their tongues have a useless version of the gene Tas1r2, which encodes proteins that combine to form sugar-detecting sensors on the tongue, National Geographic reported. 

Giant leaf-tailed geckos

Watch out! If the giant leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus fimbriatus) feels threatened, it will make sure you do, too. When this gecko is disturbed, it opens its jaws wide, flashing its bright red mouth and tongue before it releases a piercing distress call that sounds just like a child's scream, Smithsonian's National Zoo reports.

Frogs

Frogs are famous for their fast tongues, and for good reason. More than 4,000 frog species can grab objects with their tongues faster than the human eye can blink, according to Alexis Noel, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute who studies frog and cat tongues, previously reported on her website. She noted that frog mouths have a unique anatomy: "Unlike humans, frog tongues are connected at the front of the lower jaw, rather than at the back of the throat."

In addition to its speed, the frog tongue is strong. The tongue of the horned frog can pull objects that are about 1.4 times the frog's body weight, a 2014 study in the journal Scientific Reports found.

Blue-tongued skinks

Blue-tongued skinks, natives of Australia and New Guinea, use their vibrant blue tongue to startle predators, according to the San Diego Zoo. When threatened, the skink puffs up its body so that it appears larger, opens its mouth and hisses while it sticks out its tongue.

Eagles

Eagles have tongues with backward-facing barbs called "rear-directed papillae," which help them swallow prey, according to the Center for Conservation Biology, a research group at the College of William and Mary and the Virginia Commonwealth University. When eagle parents are feeding their young, they use their tongues to help keep away large bones, furry chunks and sharp fins that could cause the chicks to choke, according to the Raptor Resource Project, a nonprofit bird group based in Iowa.

Alligator snapping turtles

The alligator-snapping turtle (Macrochelys temminckii) has a clever trick; it uses its little pink tongue as a fishing lure. While these turtles are known to forage for food along the bottoms of rivers, lakes and swamps, they can also lie still with their mouths open and tongues wriggling, as they wait to ambush fish that mistake their tongues for worms, according to the Nonindigenous Aquatic Species program of the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Parrots

How do parrots and parakeets (a type of parrot) mimic human speech? It turns out that Polly can adjust her nimble, muscular tongue so that it modulates the sound coming from her voice box, according to Science magazine. In one small experiment, repositioning the tongue of five dead monk parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus), whose vocal tracts were connected to speaker systems, led to changes in pitch and loudness, which is key for forming vowels in speech, according to a 2004 study in the journal Current Biology.

Emperor tamarins

While humans might take note of the emperor tamarin's distinctive mustache, its fellow emperor tamarins (Saguinus imperator) may have their eyes on something else: the tongue. When these primates are displeased, they tend to flick their tongues, quickly moving the tongue in and out of the mouth, according to Apenheul Primate Park, a zoo in the Netherlands. The emperor tamarin also communicates with shrill calls, chirps, hisses and facial expressions, which, combined with tongue flicking, help keep its troop together and alert to danger, according to the New England Primate Conservancy.

Flies

That hairy appendage dangling out of a fly's mouth may look like a tongue, but it's not. Scientists call it the labellum, and it's the primary taste organ for the Drosophila fruit fly, according to a report from Indiana Public Media. The labellum is attached to the fly's straw-like proboscis, which allows the pest to slurp up food. A word to the wise: Put your leftovers away if you've got a fly problem. These buzzing beasties puke saliva and digestive juices onto food before eating it, because these acids dissolve the food the fly wants to suck up, according to HowStuffWorks. 

Giant anteater

The giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) doesn't have teeth, but it doesn't need them; instead, it uses its roughly 2-foot-long (60 cm) tongue to eat up to 30,000 ants and termites a day, according to the San Diego Zoo. This narrow and spaghetti-like tongue, which is attached to the mammal's sternum, is covered with tiny, backward-pointing spines and sticky saliva to help it grab the tiny insects. The anteater's tongue is fast, too — it can dart in and out of its mouth up to 150 times a minute. 

Chameleons

Chameleons are relatively slow creatures, but their 20-inch-long (50 cm) tongues are fast enough to catch speedy insects, such as locusts, mantids and grasshoppers. The tip of the chameleon's tongue is a ball of muscle, and once it hits prey, that ball transforms into a suction cup. The instant the prey is stuck, the reptile draws its tongue back into its mouth, where its strong jaws crush the catch, according to the San Diego Zoo. 

Hummingbirds

Hummingbird tongues were misunderstood for more than 180 years, until a 2015 study set the record straight. Initially, scientists thought that hummingbird tongues used capillary action — in which liquid can flow through narrow channels, even against gravity — to pull up floral nectar. But actually, these tongues act as elastic micropumps, according to the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 

High-speed videos showed that the hummingbird flattens the tip of its outstretched tongue against a desirable flower, then reshapes its tongue so it can fill with nectar. Next, the top of the tongue (the part by the mouth) bends, which produces elastic energy that can draw the nectar out of the flower. This process lets the bird slurp up its food at fast speeds, the study found.

Editor's note: This countdown was originally published on Aug. 28, 2020 and updated on July 10, 2024 to give it a new format and update links.

By searching through satellites for poop trails in Antarctica, a scientist recently identified four previously undiscovered emperor penguin colonies. This brings the total number of known breeding colonies for this vulnerable species to 66, according to a paper published Jan. 20 in the journal Antarctic Science.

The findings "give us an idea of the distribution and where the colonies are, and that's really, really important if we're going to monitor how they adapt to climate change," study author Peter Fretwell, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, told NBC News.

To identify these colonies, Fretwell combined data collected by the Maxar WorldView-2 imagery monitoring satellite and the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellite between 2018 and 2022. Even from space, scientists can spot brown smudges from the penguin's guano, or excrement. The colonies Fretwell discovered likely have existed for many years, he said.

RELATED: Emperor penguins join threatened species list, thanks to climate change

They are mostly small groups, with less than 1,000 breeding pairs each. Some of the newly discovered colonies are near other established penguin hotspots. One of the unreported areas — on the coast of Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica — is located around 31 miles (50 kilometers) from an abandoned Russian research station, which never had any published records of emperor penguin sightings while it was operational, according to the paper.

Another new colony site was located on the northern side of the Lazarev Ice Shelf, where a larger colony was once recorded but declared extinct in 2019. "It seems highly probable that the newly reported site is a movement of the old Lazarev colony, possibly due to the extension of the ice tongue or a change in sea-ice conditions," Fretwell wrote in the study.

These findings increase the global emperor penguin population by up to 5,700 pairs. However, the population of the lost Lazarev penguin colony was estimated to be around 4,500 pairs, and the new colony appears to be much smaller, so "the overall contribution to the global population is probably minimal," Fretwell wrote in the paper.

Emperor penguins are the largest penguin species, weighing up to 100 pounds (45 kilograms), around the same weight as most 13-year-old boys. With just around 200,000 breeding pairs left in the wild, they are also among the most threatened penguin species, and are projected to be quasi-extinct by the end of the century, according to a 2021 study.

The penguins breed at the coldest time of the year in Antarctica and raise their young on frozen patches of sea ice so that their chicks fledge in the summer. However, sea ice is melting at rapid rates due to warming temperatures, putting this species at peril.

"Emperor penguins have taken it upon themselves to try to find more stable sea ice," Fretwell told the Associated Press.

Dinosaurs often steal the limelight when it comes to fossils, but other prehistoric critters are just as deserving of our attention. As 2023 comes to a close, it's time to look back on some of the most  jaw-dropping fossil discoveries that weren't all about T. rex. From a fish with eyes too big for its stomach to the largest ever fossilized flower and mysterious marine fossils that glow gold, here's our pick of non-dino fossils that blew our socks off in 2023.

Largest penguin to walk Earth

In February, scientists described fossils belonging to the largest known species of penguins — Kumimanu fordycei, which weighed a whopping 340 pounds (154 kilograms). These colossal penguins glided through the ocean around what is now New Zealand more than 50 million years ago, bones discovered inside beach boulders in North Otago on the country's South Island revealed.

Researchers estimated the weight of K. fordycei based on the size and density of these bones compared with those of living penguins. The fossilized remains of eight other penguin specimens were also uncovered inside the boulders, including those of the newfound species Petradyptes stonehousei and a known species of giant penguin, K. biceae.

Giant penguins likely disappeared around 27 million years ago, when they were outcompeted by marine mammals similar in size, experts told Live Science.

Tiny penguin skulls

In June, researchers identified two tiny skull fossils from New Zealand's North Island as belonging to a never-before-seen extinct species, which they named Wilson's little penguin (Eudyptula wilsonae). The skulls, one from an adult and the other from a juvenile, were remarkably similar to those of the smallest living species of penguin today — the little penguin (Eudyptula minor).

Researchers don't know exactly how small the extinct birds were, but little penguins grow to a maximum size of 13.5 inches (35 centimeters) and weigh around 2 pounds (0.9 kg), which may be in the ballpark.

Related: Ancient skeletons of largest-ever marsupial unearthed in Australia

Fossilized flower mystery solved

In January, scientists finally got to the bottom of a 150-year-old mystery. They discovered that a flower entombed in a hunk of amber and discovered in the Baltic forests of Northern Europe in 1872 is a newfound species named Symplocos kowalewskii that dates to the late Eocene epoch (roughly 38 million to 33.9 million years ago).

The specimen, which measures about 1 inch (2.8 cm) wide, is the largest fossilized flower ever recorded and is three times the size of the next-biggest amber-encased bloom. 

Trilobites' hidden third eye

Scientists examining a fossilized trilobite specimen — an extinct marine arthropod that lived during the Paleozoic Era (541 million to 252 million years ago) — discovered that these prehistoric creatures didn't have just a pair of compound eyes, as previously thought, but also sported a third eye in the middle of their forehead.

The trilobite specimen was missing a part of its head, which gave researchers a glimpse under a layer of shell that becomes opaque during the fossilization process and obscures the structures beneath. Hidden median eyes are common among arthropods living today.

Baby turtles mistaken for plants

A re-examination of two ancient "plant" fossils discovered in Colombia 50 years ago revealed they are actually the remains of hatchling turtles from the dinosaur age. The 2-inch-long (5 cm), leaf-shaped fossils fooled their finder, who originally placed them within a group of plants that thrived during the Late Devonian (419.2 million to 358.9 million years ago) and the Permian (298.9 million to 251.9 million years ago). 

In December, it turned out the fossils were extremely rare imprints of the upper shells of baby turtles dating back to the Aptian age (125 million to 113 million years ago) of the Cretaceous (145 million to 66 million years ago).

It's possible the hatchlings were members of the oldest sea turtles on record — Desmatochelys padillai — but researchers would need a complete skeleton to confirm this.

Related: Flesh-eating 'killer' lampreys that lived 160 million years ago unearthed in China

Beheaded in action

A fossil from the Middle Triassic (247 million to 237 million years ago), which was discovered on the border between Italy and Switzerland, showed bone breaks and tooth marks consistent with a brutal beheading. The victim, a giant marine reptile called Tanystropheus hydroides with a neck three times as long as its torso, had its head torn off in one clean bite by an even deadlier creature that likely swooped down from above, experts said.

It's unclear which predator could have killed the 20-foot-long (6 meters) reptile, but researchers narrowed down a list of suspects by measuring the distance between the tooth marks. Potential candidates include the 18-foot-long (5.5 m) ichthyosaur Cymbospondylus buchseri; an enormous reptile measuring up to 23 feet (7 m) long called Nothosaurus giganteus; and Helveticosaurus zollingeri — an enigmatic, 12-foot-long (3.6 m) predator.

Slasher dolphin with jutting teeth

In June, researchers identified a stunningly preserved dolphin skull as a newfound species that lived 25 million years ago during the Oligocene period (34 million to 23 million years ago). The fossil, which was first discovered buried in a cliff face in 1998 and was being held in a museum collection in New Zealand, was recently named Nihohae matakoi, from Maori words meaning "slashing teeth, face sharp."

The skull was around 2 feet (60 cm) long and sported long teeth that stuck out almost horizontally from what would have been the snout. These spade-like teeth were probably unsuited to catching fish, the researchers said, but the creature may have thrashed at its prey to stun it before slurping it up. It's also possible the dolphin's jutting teeth served a sexual or social purpose.

Prehistoric fish's last supper

An intriguing fossil found in a museum drawer captured the moment a prehistoric fish swallowed an ammonite — an extinct marine mollusk — and choked to death on it. The ammonite remained intact inside the fish's body and became imprinted in rocks, lodged up against the predator's spine. The pair likely died together about 180 million years ago, during the Jurassic period (201 million to 145 million years ago).

The fossil was discovered in 1977 near Stuttgart, in southwest Germany, but researchers initially stored it away, as they thought the pairing of the fossilized fish and ammonite was a coincidence. Another look recently revealed the ammonite was inside the fish and likely caused its death due to the mollusk's size — equivalent to a human swallowing a dinner plate.

Related: Low water levels in Lake Powell reveal 'extremely rare' fossils from extinct Jurassic mammal relative

Mysterious golden fossils

Shimmering fossils of marine animals from Germany's Posidonia Shale were long thought to glow gold thanks to a mineral called pyrite, but they turned out to contain very little of it. Instead, researchers traced the fossils' golden glimmer to phosphate minerals with yellow calcite. Unlike pyrite, phosphate minerals need oxygen to form, which revealed new information about the fossilization process in the region.

Fossils from the Posidonia Shale — which include ammonites, bivalves and crustaceans from the Jurassic period — are found in what researchers once thought was a completely oxygen-depleted environment. The discovery of phosphate minerals in the grooves means a burst of oxygen must have reached them at some point, turning the fossils into what looks like gold.

Mystery of prehistoric shrimp's supper solved

A shrimp-like Cambrian critter's choice of food has surprised scientists: It was thought to feed by piercing hard-shelled prey, but it turns out it likely hunted soft-bodied animals instead. In July, computer models of fossils dating to 500 million years ago suggested Anomalocaris canadensis, which was about the size of a house cat and boasted two spiky facial appendages, probably swam like a cuttlefish with its appendages outstretched to pincushion prey.

Contrary to what was previously thought, A. canadensis' appendages probably weren't robust enough to skewer trilobites — extinct marine arthropods with a tough exoskeleton. So the strange creature more likely feasted on squishy animals floating in the water column.

Fleeing vampire with luminous organs

A new analysis of fossils belonging to a group of mostly extinct, octopus-like creatures called vampyromorpha revealed a previously undescribed species with eight arms, sucker attachments like a vampire squid and glow-in-the-dark organs. 

The 3.2-inch-long (8 cm), bullet-shaped creature stalked Earth's oceans 165 million years ago and likely snatched prey using its arms. Researchers in France named it Vampyrofugiens atramentum — a combination of the Serbian word for vampire, "vampir," and the Latin word for fleeing, "fugiens" — meaning the fleeing vampire. 

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), a particularly lethal form of bird flu, has been detected in birds in Antarctica for the first time.

Researchers with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) made the discovery after investigating reports of illness and unexplained deaths among seabirds on Bird Island, an island in the South Atlantic off the northwest tip of South Georgia that houses a BAS research station. To find out what was sickening the animals, the researchers took clinical samples from the birds there and sent these off for analysis. Swabs from brown skuas (Stercorarius antarcticus) revealed the animals had a type of bird flu called HPAI H5N1, according to a statement released Monday (Oct. 23).

"Whilst the source of the disease on Bird Island is not certain, it is likely that it was introduced via skuas returning from their migration in Argentina where there are known to be a high number of cases," the BAS statement noted. An ongoing H5N1 outbreak that began in 2022 has killed seabirds around the world, and the infection has also spilled over to mammals, the statement added.

H5N1 primarily infects domestic birds, including chickens and turkeys, and various wild birds, such as ducks and geese. In 2022, it drove devastating outbreaks on U.S. bird farms. It sometimes infects mammals, including cats, mink, foxes, seals and sea lions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). On rare occasions, people can catch H5N1, the CDC considers it a low risk to public health because it's never been found to spread between people.

Related: Ultra-rare, deep-diving whale dies on New England beach with possible case of bird flu

The new cases of H5N1 detected among Bird Island skuas raise concerns for local wildlife.

"There are species on some of the Antarctic islands and sub-Antarctic islands that are unique to those islands, and only occur in small numbers, in hundreds or thousands," Thijs Kuiken, a veterinary pathologist at Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, told New Scientist. "If the virus reaches those populations, they are in threat of extinction."

Slow-breeding birds such as penguins and albatrosses could also face major losses, he noted. If, say, 50% to 70% of a breeding colony dies off, "it will take years, if not decades, for these populations to return to their previous levels," he said.

In August, Kuiken and other avian flu experts warned that H5N1 would likely soon spread to the Antarctic region from South America, and now their prediction has seemingly come true. Because the region has never seen an outbreak of highly pathogenic bird flu, scientists fear the isolated wildlife there may be hit particularly hard, The New York Times reported in August. (Other types of bird flu have sickened birds in Antarctica before, but not HPAI.)

So far, at least 30 birds on Bird Island have been killed by H5N1, BAS staff told New Scientist.

A massive iceberg around half the size of Rhode Island recently smashed into a penguin refuge in Antarctica, two years after it was birthed from a similar collision. But it seems to have caused minimal damage.

The hefty tabular berg, named D-30A, is around 45 miles (72 kilometers) long and 12.5 miles (20 km) wide. It is the largest remaining piece of D-30, which was birthed in June 2021 when its parent berg D-28 smashed into land near the Borchgrevink Ice Shelf in eastern Antarctica and broke in two. Since then, D-30A has slowly drifted west along the Antarctic coast.

In late 2022, D-30A suddenly changed course and made a beeline for Clarence Island — the easternmost of the South Shetland Islands, which has a surface area around 10 times smaller than D-30A. On Sept. 6, the enormous slab of ice slammed into the island's south coastline before spinning around to the east of the island and heading out to sea several days later, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. 

Clarence Island is an important breeding site for chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarcticus), with around 100,000 breeding pairs visiting the island each winter to lay and incubate their eggs. Researchers were concerned that the berg may have impacted this population. However, those fears were soon alleviated.

"The timing was lucky because the chinstraps that breed there had not returned to the colony yet," Heather Lynch, a statistical ecologist at Stony Brook University in New York, said in the statement. If the collision had happened a couple of months later, when the penguins were on the island, it could have been "quite serious," she added.

Related: Massive iceberg narrowly avoided collision with Antarctic ice shelf 

Icebergs colliding with islands can be very disruptive for wildlife, especially if the bergs get stuck on the seafloor surrounding the isolated landmasses. The ice can prevent marine animals from heading out to sea to feed and can also alter the temperature and salinity of the surrounding waters. As the ice scrapes across the seafloor, it can also destroy seafloor ecosystems and majorly imbalance the surrounding food web.

In late 2020, alarm bells were raised when the world's largest iceberg at the time, A-68A, appeared to be on a collision course with South Georgia in the South Atlantic Ocean, which is an important penguin and seal refuge . Experts predicted that it would get snagged on the seafloor and potentially stay there for several years. However, at the last minute, the mighty berg veered away and missed the island completely before disintegrating into half a dozen pieces.   

Clarence Island's surrounding seafloor may have helped avert a catastrophe due to its deepness, making it less likely that D-30A would get stuck there. "It didn’t 'stick' quite likely because the eastern side of Clarence Island has a pretty sheer drop-off with deep enough water to allow the berg to sail right through," Christopher Shuman, a glaciologist at the University of Maryland and NASA's Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory, said in the statement. 

However, even though the berg didn't stick around for long, it could have caused real problems for the penguins had they been nesting on the island. As they incubate their eggs, nesting penguins rely on their partners to hunt for food for them, Lynch said. "While nesting, even a few days of blocked access to the colony might mean a failed breeding year," she noted.

Instead, the close encounter may actually be a good thing for the local wildlife. As D-30A passed the island it likely released iron-rich meltwater that could support increased algal growth in the area, researchers said.

D-30A now appears to be heading into the Drake Passage, nicknamed "iceberg alley," where massive icebergs get caught in ocean currents that drag them into warmer waters to their doom. In November 2022, the world's former largest iceberg, A-76A, was spotted in the same passage  before eventually breaking apart around 1,500 miles (2,415 km) further north in June this year.  

A massive die-off has hit emperor penguin chicks from four colonies in West Antarctica due to record-smashing low sea ice this year, a new study finds.

The finding supports predictions that 98% of all emperor penguin colonies could become "quasi-extinct" by 2100, meaning the number of surviving penguins may be too small to maintain viable populations.

"We have never seen emperor penguins fail to breed, at this scale, in a single season," study lead author Peter Fretwell, a geographic information scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, said in a statement. "The loss of sea ice in this region during the Antarctic summer made it very unlikely that displaced chicks would survive."

Emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri), the tallest and heaviest penguin living today, need stable sea ice that is firmly frozen to the shore to survive and breed. They mate and lay their eggs during the Antarctic winter, between May and June, and the hatchlings emerge after an incubation period of 65 days. Chicks remain covered in fine down until November, when they start to fledge and grow waterproof feathers. Before then, chicks are highly reliant on their parents and require just the right amount of sea ice to survive.

Related: Antarctic currents supplying 40% of world's deep ocean with nutrients and oxygen slowing dramatically 

"If there's too much sea ice, trips to bring food from the ocean become long and arduous [for parents], and their chicks may starve," Stéphanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist and associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, wrote in The Conversation. "With too little sea ice, the chicks are at risk of drowning." 

Researchers monitor emperor penguins using their droppings, or guano, which leaves brown stains on the frosty landscape that can be seen from space. Over the past 14 years, satellite images have revealed evidence of five relatively small colonies that return every year to the same locations in the Bellingshausen Sea region of western Antarctica to breed.

In a study published Thursday (Aug. 24) in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, researchers examined satellite images from this region and found that four of these five colonies probably lost all their chicks this year due to dwindling sea ice.

The last two years have seen the lowest levels of sea ice since satellite monitoring began 45 years ago. Researchers recorded extreme losses in the central and eastern Bellingshausen Sea, where sea ice completely melted away in November 2022, according to the study. Another record low was set in June, when Antarctic sea ice should have been growing, spelling the possibility of a long-term decline. 

If this pattern persists, the scientists warned in the study, there could be "grave consequences" for emperor penguins, which are already listed as threatened on the U.S. endangered species list. 

This is the first time on record that regional sea ice loss has caused a mass die-out of the iconic penguins' chicks. "Our findings show a clear link between negative sea ice anomalies and emperor penguin breeding failures that may represent a snapshot of a future, warming Antarctica," the researchers wrote.

While sea ice levels in Antarctica are known to fluctuate with atmospheric and oceanic changes, such as those triggered this year by El Niño, climate change could be to blame for dramatic losses in recent years.

"Tumbling sea ice records and warming of the subsurface Southern Ocean point strongly to human-induced global warming exacerbating these extremes," Caroline Holmes, a polar climate scientist with the British Antarctic Survey who was not involved in the study, said in the statement.

Emperor penguins respond to localized sea ice loss by switching to more stable breeding sites the following year, according to the study. But this strategy will no longer be sustainable if large swathes of their frosty habitat melt away in the coming decades, the researchers said.

Scientists have uncovered the twee remains of one of the smallest extinct penguin species ever found, which waddled around New Zealand around 3 million years ago.

Researchers unearthed two fossilized skulls belonging to the newly discovered species, named Wilson's little penguin (Eudyptula wilsonae), in the southern Taranaki region of the country's North Island. The shape of the skulls, which belonged to a fully grown adult and a juvenile, are remarkably similar in both size and shape to little penguins (Eudyptula minor), which still exist today and are the smallest living species of penguin. 

Due to the lack of bones, researchers are unsure exactly how small the extinct birds were, but living little penguins normally grow to a maximum size of around 13.5 inches (35 centimeters) and weigh around 2 pounds (0.9 kilogram).

E. wilsonae was described in a study published June 21 in the Journal of Paleontology.

Today, little penguins and its four subspecies live across New Zealand, mainland Australia and Tasmania, but experts are unsure where they originated. The new finding suggests that the genus had its roots firmly planted in New Zealand, researchers wrote in a statement.

Related: Kids discover giant penguin’s fossil skeleton in New Zealand

The fact that the little penguin lineage has remained relatively unchanged for such a long time is also a testament to its evolutionary resilience, study lead author Daniel Thomas, a zoologist at Massey University in New Zealand, said in the statement. "The climate has changed a lot over this time and this lineage has been robust to those changes," he said.

The discovery can help scientists fill in the gaps of this ecosystem's history and provide insights into other extinct and living species from the country, the researchers wrote.

Little penguins are currently listed as "least concern" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, which means they have large and stable populations. However, some populations have faced serious problems in recent years.  

In June 2022, more than 500 little penguins mysteriously washed up dead on beaches in New Zealand. Some of the dead birds weighed less than half of what a typical little penguin weighs. Researchers suspect they were not eating enough because hotter ocean surface temperatures — driven by climate change — had pushed their prey out of the little penguins' reach. 

And in 2020, an entire colony of around 6,000 little penguins was wiped out when conservationists attempted to reintroduce Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) to a small island off the coast of Tasmania. 

E. wilsonae is not the only interestingly-sized extinct penguin to be uncovered recently: The same research team that uncovered the tiny bird also recently discovered the largest penguin to ever walk the planet. In February, they revealed Kumimanu fordycei, which dates back to around 59.5 million years ago and weighed a whopping 340 pounds (154 kg), which is around 170 times heavier than E. wilsonae.

Scientists have unearthed the fossilized remains of the largest ever known penguin on Earth, a 340-pound (154 kilograms) behemoth that glided through the oceans around what is now New Zealand more than 50 million years ago.

The fossils of this newfound species, Kumimanu fordycei, were found alongside eight other specimens inside beach boulders in North Otago, on New Zealand's South Island. Five of the remaining specimens belonged to another newfound species, Petradyptes stonehousei, one belonged to another known giant penguin, Kumimanu biceae, and two were unidentified. The rocks dated to between 59.5 million and 55.5 million years ago.

In a study, published Feb. 8 in the Journal of Paleontology, researchers estimated the weight of the two newfound species based on the size and density of their bones compared with those of modern penguins. The team found that P. stonehousei weighed around 110 pounds (50 kilograms), which is slightly above the weight of living emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri). K. fordeycei would have weighed more than three times that, tipping the scales at a whopping 340 pounds. For comparison, the average 20-year-old man in the U.S. weighs 198 pounds (90 kg), according to Healthline. (Without a near-complete skeleton, the researchers weren't able to estimate the body length of the new species.)

"According to our analyses, K. fordycei is the biggest penguin currently known," study first author Daniel Ksepka, a palaeontologist and curator at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, told Live Science in an email. 

Related: Kids discover giant penguin's fossil skeleton in New Zealand 

Previously, the largest penguin on record was Palaeeudyptes klekowskii, which lived around 37 million years ago in Antarctica, weighed 256 pounds (116 kg) and stood at around 6.6 feet (2 meters) tall, earning it the nickname "colossus penguin." The next largest, K. biceae, weighed around 267 pounds (121 kg) and had a body length of around 5.8 feet (1.8 m). 

The two new species were likely among some of the first ancient penguins. The new discovery could shed light on how the group evolved over time. 

The new species had "relatively primitive flipper bones," Ksepka said. "In many ways [they] resemble those of birds that can both fly through the air and propel themselves underwater with their wings, such as auks and puffins." (But neither of the new species could fly.)

Penguins likely lost the ability to fly in favor of swimming around 60 million years ago, not long before the new species likely emerged. So these early penguins had not yet evolved the super-efficient flippers seen in younger ancient penguins and their living relatives.

The enormous size of K. fordycei shows that gigantism evolved early on in the penguin lineage, Ksepka said. "It goes to show that the advantages of large size, such as more efficient thermoregulation and diving, probably exerted very strong selective pressure on penguins soon after they lost flight."

The unique environmental conditions of ancient New Zealand played a key role in the emergence and success of giant penguins, the researchers speculate.

Related: Noodle-necked swimming dinosaur may have been a diving predator like a penguin

"New Zealand is (and has been) a great place to be a penguin," Ksepka said. "There are good feeding grounds offshore for marine birds, and there were no land mammals other than bats in New Zealand before humans arrived, which makes for safer nesting areas."

Giant penguins like K. fordcyei disappeared around 27 million years ago, according to Australian Geographic. What caused their extinction is still an "unresolved question," but it is likely that the enormous birds were eventually outcompeted by marine mammals of similar size, Kspeka said.

K. fordcyei may be the largest known penguin so far, but it's possible that even larger birds roamed New Zealand. 

"The size of K. fordcyei doesn't necessarily mean there wasn't an even larger species that is yet to be discovered," Ksepka said. 

A never-before-seen emperor penguin colony — one of only 66 known to exist — has been spotted by accident in satellite photographs of West Antarctica that clearly show their guano, or droppings, staining the ice.

The colony is estimated to be home to about 1,000 adult birds, in 500 pairs with their young, which makes it relatively small for an emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) breeding site. But it's an important addition to what's known of the species.

Peter Fretwell, a geographic information officer with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), discovered the colony in December; but the announcement was delayed so that it coincided with Penguin Awareness Day, which is held on Jan. 20 each year.

Fretwell told Live Science that he was looking at sea ice loss in photographs from the European Space Agency's two Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites when he spotted the distinctive signs of an emperor penguin colony. "I could see what looked like a very small brown stain on the ice," he said.

Related: Over 60 million years ago, penguins abandoned flight for swimming. Here’s how.

Higher resolution photographs of the same area taken in October by the Maxar WorldView-3 satellite, which can image objects as small as 12 inches (30 centimeters) across, confirmed the presence of the breeding colony, near West Antarctica's Verleger Point, Fretwell said.

Because the penguins' guano accumulates and stains the ice and snow a deep-brown color, it is much easier to see from afar than the emperor penguins themselves. But the high-resolution images also show individual emperor penguins — pictured as tiny dots — and the population estimate is based on those, Fretwell said.

Seabirds by satellite

Emperor penguin colonies are often remote and difficult to study, but BAS scientists have discovered several in satellite photos of Antarctica's coastline over the past 15 years. Recent satellite research has even suggested that there could be around 20% more emperor penguins in the Antarctic than previously estimated. 

Emperor penguins exclusively breed on packed sea ice. This reliance on sea ice, however, also makes the penguins vulnerable to its loss in a warming climate; and West Antarctica has already been badly affected.

"Last year we had the minimum ever sea ice extent in Antarctica, and this year is even worse, for two consecutive years," Fretwell said. "It's estimated that we will probably lose a minimum of 80% of emperor penguin colonies before the end of the century."

Due to this threat from climate change, emperors are now listed as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Stately penguins

Emperor penguins are the tallest and heaviest of all penguins, typically reaching up to 39 inches (100 cm) in height and weighing up to 100 pounds (45 kilograms.) They get their name from their dramatic black, white and yellow plumage.

Emperors spend most of the Antarctic summer diving for fish, crustaceans and krill. They breed during the dark winter months on the surface of the packed sea ice, sometimes more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the open ocean, and where temperatures can dip as low as minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 60 Celsius.).

Fretwell recently visited Antarctica to observe another large emperor penguin colony by aerial drone, to confirm the numerical estimates of penguin breeding colonies only seen in satellite photographs.

And while he got close enough to smell the penguin poop, it wasn't that bad, he said.

Because emperor penguin colonies are on sea ice, much of the guano is frozen and doesn't smell — unlike the colonies of penguins that breed among rocks, where the smell can be intense. "The emperors are more stately and not as smelly as other penguins," he said.

Researchers have cracked the case of why erect-crested penguins in New Zealand reject their first-laid eggs.

These penguins, which mate in monogamous pairs, lay an egg only to abandon it in favor of a second egg, which they then incubate until it hatches. Laying eggs is energy intensive, and so this behavior is highly unusual in birds, but a study published Oct. 12 in the journal PLOS One offers new insight into the odd practice.

After studying the breeding biology of erect-crested penguins (Eudyptes sclateri), an endangered species known for its spiky crown of feathers, researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand determined that the penguin parents condemn one egg to oblivion to ensure that the second egg successfully hatches, as the birds  know that they can't feed two chicks. (One of the only other known species that performs a similar behavior is the closely related macaroni penguins — Eudyptes chrysolophus — of Antarctica.) 

When the study authors compared the eggs from a colony of 158 penguins, the scientists discovered that the first and second eggs, which are typically laid five days apart, differed dramatically in size.

"The second eggs were much larger than the first eggs, and the difference [in size] between the two is the largest of any bird species," Lloyd Davis, the study's lead author and a professor in the department of science communication at the University of Otago, told Live Science. "In most birds, the clutch [of eggs] gets smaller as they're laid, but in this case, the second egg is on average 85% larger than the first one."

Since 1998, Davis and his team have been studying this elusive species and its "bizarre behavior" around egg-laying. The researchers recently spent 250 hours observing the penguins and their eggs "in the drizzle" of the birds' breeding grounds on the Bounty and Antipodes islands — specks of rocky land in the South Pacific Ocean off the southeastern coast of mainland New Zealand.

Related: Are penguins really monogamous?

"We noticed that about 45% of the penguins don't even bother incubating their first egg — they just look at it after it's laid," Davis said. "Most penguin species will make nests with stones, sticks and grasses, but over 90% of erect-crested penguins lay their eggs on a rocky platform, which is not exactly level, and the eggs tend to roll off it."

To mitigate this, scientists set up a "ring of stones" around 14 nests to prevent the eggs from rolling off the outcroppings. But even that didn't encourage the penguins to nurture the first eggs they laid.

"They still rejected the first egg," Davis said. 

In addition to monitoring the birds, the scientists also collected blood samples, which revealed another piece of the puzzle when they were analyzed in the laboratory.

"Normally, you would expect the males to have higher testosterone levels at the start of the breeding period, while the females' levels would be lower, but we found something different," David said. "The males had low testosterone, while the females' levels were at least as high, or probably higher than the males, especially during the laying of their eggs."

This shift in testosterone could explain another unusual behavior in the penguin males. Unlike other species in the animal kingdom in which males become more aggressive toward one another during the breeding period, erect-crested penguin males remain docile.

"The males just weren't interested," he said. "In other species, there's a lot of fighting amongst the males within a colony. But with the erect-crested penguins, there's a lot of standing around and not engaging in many fights."

Of all the penguin species on the planet, erect-crested penguins are the least-studied due to their isolation. But while their remote habitat may shield these birds from human activity to an extent, their future is still threatened by climate change, adding to the urgency of learning more about these "forgotten penguins" before it's too late, Davis said.

"Little is known about them," he said. "They're an enigma."

There's something sweet — perhaps even romantic — about penguin courtship. After spending months at sea, hunting for fish and swimming in the iciest waters, female Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) toboggan to the same breeding grounds, year after year. Waddling through a bar scene of trumpeting, preening males, they ignore advances and make a bee-line for their mates from the previous season: males who’ve arrived before the females to tidy up their nest. 

Such penguins are paragons of long-term commitment. But are all penguins so committed to one partner throughout their lives? 

Turns out, these penguins may be the exception, not the rule. Although most penguins pair with only a single partner each breeding season, they may copulate with many other penguins in a breeding colony before settling down to nest. And fidelity rates differ widely across species. Penguin love — it's complicated.

"The short answer is no, penguins are not really monogamous," said Emma Marks, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who studies breeding behavior and mate choice in colonial breeding species — birds that congregate in vast colonies for nesting. "Colonial breeders such as penguins may be monogamous, in that they have one mate with whom they nest and raise chicks each season," Marks told Live Science. "But that doesn't mean there aren't 'extracurricular activities' going on."

Related: Same-sex penguins hatch their first chick at New York zoo

It's safe to say that penguins are not sexually monogamous. Many penguins play the field before hunkering down with a mate for the season — sometimes copulating with other members of the colony who have already been spoken for, causing drama of soap-opera proportions, according to Marks.

When a pair-bonded male fails to return to the breeding grounds, for instance, his lonely mate may shack up with a different male. When that male's dutiful partner from last season arrives at the nest only to find a new female in her place, a fight ensues. The original female usually wins.

One consequence of these messy love triangles is that, by the time a female lays her egg, it's not always clear whether the male she'll be spending the season with is raising his own chick. A 2018 study in the journal Zoo Biology described one gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) in a Utah aquarium who, through the promiscuity of his pair-bonded mate, ended up raising two chicks that were the offspring of a different male. Scientists aren't sure how often this happens in nature because, while trackers and other technologies can help researchers keep tabs on mating behavior and pair bonding, there has been no concerted effort to paternity test chicks in the wild, the study authors reported.

At the same time, penguins are more or less socially monogamous. It takes two committed partners to raise a chick in a harsh environment such as Antarctica, and penguins pair bond to efficiently divide the responsibilities of nest maintenance, egg incubation and hunting.

"Social monogamy is a prerequisite," Marks said. "Raising chicks requires a lot of coordination between the two and, if that broke down, breeding would be a failure for the season."

These social arrangements can persist long-term, each breeding season bringing the same two penguin parents back to their nest for another year. How often that happens depends partly on the species. A 2013 literature review, published in the journal Comptes Rendus Biologies, found that 89% of Galapagos penguins (Spheniscus mendiculus) stick with their mates; however, at 1999 study in the journal The Auk found that only 15% of emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) seek out the same partner for subsequent breeding seasons. Most species return to the same partners at least somewhat consistently, with fidelity rates between 59% and 89%, according to the 2013 study. 

The success of the previous season also plays a role in determining whether or not penguin couples stay together long-term, Marks explained. If the pair managed to raise chicks to maturity, and the male maintains a high-quality nest in a good location, the odds of a female returning to her previous partner are generally higher. Otherwise, females are just as likely to waddle off in search of greener pastures. 

"For colonial species, there's a lot of choice around," Marks said. "If breeding previously failed, we generally expect to see more 'divorce' in the next season."

True rates of "divorce" — in which penguins actively snub former mates in favor of new conquests — are hard to calculate, because not every penguin returns to the breeding grounds each season. When new pairings occur, it can be difficult to determine whether it's personal, or whether the penguin moved on only after its other half failed to return — for instance if it was eaten by an orca or seal.

Predation isn't the only threat to penguins' love lives. A recent study published in the journal Ambio found that penguin populations are declining in proportion to decreases in the amount of krill available to feed on. Climate change and human fishing activities are the main factors to blame for dips in krill count, according to the study. Climate-induced shifts in sea ice are also forcing penguins into different breeding grounds, breaking up long-term couples and impacting migration. Some males are now arriving at the breeding grounds exhausted from navigating the changing landscape of sea and ice, Marks said, too unkempt to woo females and too spent to properly care for eggs. 

Collectively, these factors are thought to have played a role in the widely-reported failure of Halley Bay. The breeding site that once hosted 25,000 pairs of Emperor penguins each season has been barren since 2016.

"Climate change is probably decreasing the success rates of breeding colonies," Marks said. "Whenever there are higher failure rates, we expect higher rates of mate turnover."

Originally published on Live Science.

A yellow robot named "ECHO" is helping scientists in Antarctica to keep tabs on some of the continent's penguin residents. 

At Antarctica's Atka Bay, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) are monitoring a colony of about 20,000 emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) with the help of a hybrid rover that's partly autonomous and partly remote-controlled. 

The four-wheeled robot is part of a 30-year-long WHOI program that launched in 2017, called "Monitor the health of the Antarctic marine ecosystems using the emperor penguin as a sentinel," or MARE for short. The MARE project monitors emperor penguins and uses them as indicators of overall ecosystem health in Antarctica. The project documents how well the penguins adapt to climate change and its impact on the abundance and distribution of the fish they eat, WHOI representatives said in a statement 

ECHO's purpose is to remove any human presence from penguin surveys, as counting and cataloging thousands of birds is time-consuming and can stress the animals, according to WHOI. 

Related: Here's why a new penguin colony in Antarctica is cause for concern

To make ECHO the perfect penguin monitoring vehicle, scientists equipped the 3-foot-tall (0.9 meter) rover with lidar (light detection and ranging) and GPS technology to navigate autonomously. ECHO carries sensors that help researchers monitor the penguin colony's numbers and track individuals' movement and behavior. 

For example, a radio frequency identification (RFID) antenna scans tiny RFID tags that WHOI researchers implanted in penguin chicks when the youngsters were about five months old. Since the MARE project began, researchers have tagged around 300 penguin chicks each year, according to WHOI. Once ECHO is in range of a penguin's RFID tag — about 34 inches (86 centimeters) away — the robot can retrieve information about overall fitness and breeding status, as well as oceanographic data from when the penguin was in the sea. A 360-degree camera enables scientists to identify individual penguins that ECHO encounters, and GPS data reveals the extent of the penguins' distribution and their habitat hotspots. 

Researchers at WHOI modified ECHO from a Husky robot kit created by the robot-manufacturing company Clearpath Robotics. The robotics company awarded WHOI the Husky kit in 2020, Clearpath representatives said in a statement. Prior to ECHO, MARES project data was collected using handheld RFID scanners and human observations. 

The data ECHO collects is transmitted over WI-FI to the Single Penguin Observation and Tracking Observatory (SPOT) research center. Located near the German Antarctic research base Neumayer Station III, SPOT can also carry out penguin observations, using 16 high-resolution cameras capable of pinpointing individual penguins within the colony, according to WHOI. 

Emperor penguins have no natural predators in Antarctica, so they are good study subjects for scientists looking to understand how animals are affected by ecosystem fluctuations caused by climate change.

However, the birds' survival in a warming world is uncertain. A study published in 2021 in the journal Global Change Biology reported that the rapid decline of Antarctica's ice could cause that emperor penguins to become "quasi-extinct" by 2100 — meaning that although there might still be individual penguins alive, the species as a whole would be doomed to extinction. 

"Biodiversity in the Southern Ocean is so small, compared to more temperate regions of the world, that losing any species there is kind of devastating," Daniel Zitterbart, an associate scientist at WHOI, told CNN.

WHOI researchers plan to extend ECHO's data collection efforts to include the penguins' foraging and reproductive behaviors, as well as what happens inside a penguin huddle — a social behavior in which the colony huddles together to stay warm and conserve energy. To infiltrate the penguin huddle, researchers plan to put ECHO inside a 3D-printed replica of a block of ice. ECHO and its icy disguise would then be placed in the path of a forming huddle, which typically happens in winter after the breeding season, while the male birds are brooding their eggs. This disguise would enable ECHO to collect penguin data while the birds are in close contact with each other, according to WHOI.

Originally published on Live Science.

As dusk fell over Australia's Phillip Island last week, thousands of tiny black-and-white birds participated in the largest "penguin parade" seen on the island since record-keeping began in the 1960s, with more than 5,200 little penguins (Eudyptula minor) crossing the beach in a single night. 

Phillip Island — known as Millowl to the Indigenous Bunurong people — hosts Australia's largest colony of little penguins, which is currently about 40,000 birds strong, according to the Penguin Foundation, a group that funds research and conservation efforts on the island. This is the world's smallest penguin species; the birds grow to be no bigger than about 15.7 inches (40 centimeters) tall, or about the height of a bowling pin, according to The Australian Museum. 

Every day at dusk, a subset of the Philip Island penguin population swims back to shore after hunting for fish, squid, krill and small crustaceans in the ocean, and then heads inland toward their nesting grounds. This event, locally known as the "Penguin Parade," draws large numbers of tourists to Phillip Island Nature Parks, where visitors can "sit and watch the penguins emerge from the water for 50 minutes" each night, Paula Wasiak, a Phillip Island Nature Parks field researcher, told Live Science in an email. 

"Penguin viewing has occurred at the same location for over 50 years and the birds have been habituated to nightly activity over time," she said. (If you can't make it to the island in person, you can also watch livestreams of the parade on Facebook or YouTube.)

At dusk on May 3, an unusually large number of penguins took part in the parade, as 5,219 little penguins stormed the shore at once and then took off toward their burrows. 

Related: Here's why a new penguin colony in Antarctica is cause for concern 

"We couldn’t believe our eyes when more than 5,000 penguins came out of the water in less than an hour," Wasiak said in a statement. 

To count the birds, park rangers station themselves at the four main penguin "highways" — dedicated paths that the wee birds always use to come ashore, Wasiak told Live Science. "Little penguins cross in groups, with the same penguins using the same pathway each time they enter the colony," and throughout the 50 minute parade, rangers count every bird that waddles down these paths, she said. 

The record for the island's largest penguin parade had just been broken the previous week, on April 29, when 4,592 birds came ashore at once, Wasiak told Live Science. The prior record was set on a November night in 2021, when 4,435 birds scuttled across the sand and toward their nests, according to ABC Gippsland, a local news station owned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Overall, May's parades have included surprisingly high numbers of penguins, with approximately 3,000 to 5,000 birds marching each night. "It’s been a penguin party night after night, which is unusual for this time of year, let alone in record numbers like we are seeing now," Wasiak said in the statement. Historically, the largest parades have taken place in November and December, at the peak of the birds' breeding season, according to the Penguin Foundation.

Why have this month's penguin parades swelled to such remarkable sizes? It may be that this year's La Niña event — where strong trade winds sweep across the Pacific, from South America to Indonesia — may be boosting the birds' offshore food supply, which means that more birds are congregating in coastal waters rather than seeking food farther away.

Little penguins primarily feed on small fish, such as anchovies, which can only survive in a narrow temperature range, Wasiak told Live Science. "It suggests that during La Niña years, the ocean conditions around Phillip Island are often ideal for an abundant supply of fish/food close to the shore," she said. 

Typically, when they're not breeding, the penguins can spend up to a month foraging at sea, Wasiak told ABC Gippsland. With food closer to shore, the penguins instead make quick turnaround trips and arrive back on the beach just in time for the nightly parade. 

On top of the prolonged La Niña event, the high parade attendance may be related to a phenomenon known as the "autumn breeding attempt," where older penguins in the colony attempt to breed outside of peak mating season, Wasiak told Live Science. This breeding attempt is usually preceded by an uptick in the number of penguins heading out to forage. 

May's large parades may also be a result of steady improvements in the penguins' island habitat, Wasiak told Live Science.

"One of the main areas we're seeing an increase in penguin attendance is to the east of the colony. In the past, poor habitat and erosion in this area meant penguins had difficulty accessing and nesting there," Wasiak said in the Parks' statement. "A lot of work has gone into improving dune structure, creating penguin pathways and restoring habitat, which is now paying off."

Originally published on Live Science. 

A pair of same-sex penguins hatched their first chick at Rosamond Gifford Zoo in New York and the parents are caring for it like pros.

The two male Humboldt penguins (Spheniscus humboldti) named Elmer and Lima were given an egg to incubate because the egg's biological parents have a history of accidentally breaking them. A chick hatched from the egg on Jan. 1 and is doing just fine with its same-sex parents, who keep the newborn penguin warm and fed. 

"It continues to be brooded and cared for by both Elmer and Lima, who are doing a great job," Ted Fox, the zoo's director, said in a statement. 

Related: Photos of flightless birds: All 18 penguin species 

Elmer and Lima paired up and built a nest for the breeding season. They didn't have any eggs of their own for obvious reasons, but they defended their territory and behaved as breeding penguins would, so zookeepers gave them a dummy egg to see whether they cared for it properly. 

"Some pairs, when given a dummy egg, will sit on the nest but leave the egg to the side and not incubate it correctly, or they'll fight for who is going to sit on it when," Fox said. "That's how we evaluate who will be good foster parents — and Elmer and Lima were exemplary in every aspect of egg care." The zoo swapped the dummy egg for a fertile egg and it hatched without any issues.

This isn't the first time zoos have found success using same-sex penguins as foster parents. Both male pairs and female pairs have previously hatched chicks at a number of zoos, such as in the Central Park Zoo in New York City and the Oceanogràfic Valencia aquarium in Spain. Two male black-footed penguins (Spheniscus demersusin) in DierenPark Amersfoort zoo in the Netherlands were apparently so keen to be parents that they stole an egg from another nearby pair to raise themselves, Live Science previously reported. 

Penguins of the same sex often come together as pairs. Male and female penguins share the same responsibilities when it comes to raising chicks, so there's no reason why same-sex pairs can't complete all the responsibilities of parenting, according to the Museum Studies Blog at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

Same-sex penguin pairs show that the idea of "family" is not species-specific and that in many cases, non-traditional families do a wonderful job of child-rearing, Fox said. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Scientists have discovered a previously unknown colony of gentoo penguins in one of the southernmost spots these waddling birds have ever been spotted. The discovery is a cause for concern, according to the researchers, who say that climate change is expanding the range of this temperate, non-ice-loving species of penguin.

And this isn't the only concerning find. In addition to this gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) colony with 75 nests on Andersson Island, gentoo penguins have also been sighted on an unexplored archipelago off the Antarctic Peninsula's northern tip. Both are among the first records of the species breeding so far south on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, according to a statement from Greenpeace Canada. 

Previously, these areas were too icy for gentoo penguins, which prefer temperate climes where they can raise their chicks. These penguins, the third-largest living penguin species, are native to warmer sub-Antarctic islands, such as the Falkland Islands off Argentina; and they usually live in ice-free areas, such as flat, rocky beaches and low-lying cliffs where large colonies can gather, according to Oceana, a nonprofit that wasn't involved with the new sightings.

Related: Photos of flightless birds: All 18 penguin species 

During the expedition, Greenpeace invited independent scientists aboard its icebreaker vessel MV Arctic Sunrise to sail through the Weddell Sea and help count penguins on the southern continent. 

"Mapping out these remote archipelagos will give us a better understanding of how the region's penguins are responding to rapid climate change," expedition co-leader Heather J. Lynch, a professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University in New York, said in the statement. "As expected, we're finding gentoo penguins nearly everywhere we look — more evidence that climate change is drastically changing the mix of species here on the Antarctic Peninsula."

Until now, just one solitary gentoo penguin nest had been spotted this far south. Gentoo penguins don't migrate, so conditions have to be ideal for them to stay in one location year-round, according to Mongabay.

"They're very opportunistic, so any chance they get, they're going to colonize rock as the glaciers retreat," Lynch told Mongabay. "So they're the thing that we tend to use to see how far climate change has gone in terms of turning the Antarctic Peninsula into a more sub-Antarctic or more temperate climate."

Many penguin populations are in flux due to the rapidly changing climate and increased industrial fishing, according to a Greenpeace statement. For instance, ice loss in Antarctica increased sixfold over the last 30 years, Live Science previously reported. One of Antarctica's largest glaciers — Thwaites Glacier, also known as the "Doomsday Glacier" — could collapse in just a few years, possibly increasing sea levels worldwide by more than 2 feet (65 centimeters), Live Science reported in December. 

To help native animals struggling in a warming Antarctic, scientists and conservationists are pushing for three new marine protected areas around the southern continent, including in East Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula and the Weddell Sea, which would span 1.5 million square miles (4 million square kilometers), Mongabay reported. 

"Governments need to agree [to] a new Global Ocean Treaty to deliver protection for at least 30% of the world's oceans by 2030 — and they must get to work by protecting the Antarctic's waters," Louisa Casson, of Greenpeace's Protect the Oceans campaign, who was also aboard the Arctic Sunrise, said in the statement. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Anyone in Antarctica today would have experienced the only total solar eclipse of the year, suggesting one of the largest groups of individuals to observe the gorgeous show would have been the southern continent's penguins. And that's a huge population of spectators.

During a solar eclipse, the moon moves between the sun and Earth so that it projects a shadow onto Earth. Today's total solar eclipse happened when the sun, moon and Earth, in that order, were lined up perfectly. That happened at around 2:44 a.m. EST (0744 GMT), according to NASA. Totality — when the umbra or the darkest part of the moon's shadow covers the face of Earth — lasted just 1 minute and 54 seconds at most.

People (or animals) who got to see the solar eclipse (through special glasses, as you should never look directly at the sun) were located in the center of the moon's shadow at the time it hit Earth, according to NASA. And for those individuals, as the moon's shadow crept across our planet, the sky turned dark. If you were lucky enough to be in the path of the total solar eclipse, you would have seen (through solar-eclipse glasses) the sun's outer atmosphere called the corona. (On typical days, this outer atmosphere is outshined by the face of the sun, NASA said.)

Right now, Antarctica is experiencing its summer (which lasts from about October to February), when the sun is nearly always in the sky. That means up to an estimated 4,400 to 5,500 humans could have been on and around the continent as researchers and personnel staff, according to an estimated summer population by the World Population Review. That might sound like quite a few humans on Earth's coldest continent, but they are far outnumbered by the waddling birds that live on the bottom of the world. An estimated 20 million breeding pairs of penguins call Antarctica home, according to the British Antarctic Survey. 

Luckily, the penguins are equipped for skywatching at any time of the year in their chilly home, which during the winter can plunge to average temperatures of between about 14 degrees Fahrenheit on the coast to minus 76 F at the highest points in the continent's interior (minus 10 to minus 60 degrees Celsius), according to the Australian Antarctic Program, part of the government's Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment.

Though people outside of Antarctica didn't get to see the total solar eclipse, some were treated to a partial eclipse, which occurs when the sun, moon and Earth (in that order) are not directly lined up. NASA said the partial solar eclipse, weather permitting, was observable from: parts of Saint Helena, Namibia, Lesotho, South Africa, South Georgia and Sandwich Islands, Crozet Islands, Falkland Islands, Chile, New Zealand and Australia.

Originally published on Live Science.

What's black and white and the size of a 10-year-old child? A giant, extinct penguin that lived between 27 million and 35 million years ago in what is now New Zealand. 

The enormous diving bird stood about 4.5 feet (1.4 meters) tall and had unusually long legs and beak for a penguin, according to scientists who recently described it as a newfound species. It was discovered in 2006 by fossil-hunting students with the Hamilton Junior Naturalist Club (JUNATS), a natural history club in Hamilton, New Zealand, for children ages 10 to 18. 

A group of club members, led by JUNATS fossil expert Chris Templer, found the extinct giant's bones on a small peninsula in Kawhia Harbor during a field trip. The fossil is the most complete giant penguin skeleton ever discovered, and the length of its hind limbs inspired researchers to name it Kairuku waewaeroa: "waewae" means "legs" and "roa" means "long" in the Māori language, scientists wrote in a new study about the giant bird.

Related: Photos of flightless birds: See all 18 penguin species

Today, the largest living penguin species is the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), which can measure up to 4 feet (1.2 m) tall and weigh up to 99 lbs. (45 kilograms). However, giant penguins that were even bigger were more common during the Paleogene period (about 66 million to 23 million years ago) across Zealandia — a landmass that includes New Zealand, and which is now mostly underwater. Giant penguins that lived millions of years ago were also thinner than portly emperor penguins, the researchers reported.

When the JUNATS young naturalists spied the fossil, it was sticking out of a block of sandstone that had been uncovered by the tide, and they initially mistook it for a rusty propeller. But Templer and another group leader, Tony Lorimer, quickly realized that they had found something exceptional, according to Hamilton's Waikato Museum. 

"I went 'Oh my God' and just about keeled over on the reef," Templer told Agence France Presse in 2006. At the time, he also told the Waikato Museum, "We were looking for fossil sea urchins and what we found was a penguin — what a bonus!"

But the fossil was in danger of being damaged by ocean erosion. Its location "was just on the perimeter of a scenic reserve," but it was also in a spot that was only accessible between high and low tides, so officials allowed the club to excavate the fossil, Templer told Stuff, a New Zealand news website, in 2018. He prepared the find at his home, and it remained at JUNATS' Te Kauri Lodge Museum until 2017, when the club donated the skeleton to the Waikato Museum, according to a statement.

There, scientists measured and scanned the skeleton, reconstructing it as a 3D model. The researchers compared the penguin's bones to those of other giant penguins from the Paleogene, and their measurements showed that K. waewaeroa would have towered over other species in the Kairuku genus, said study co-author Daniel Thomas, a senior lecturer in zoology at Massey University’s School of Natural and Computational Sciences in Auckland, New Zealand. 

Longer legs may also have played a role in K. waewaeroa's performance in the water, helping it to swim faster or dive deeper, Thomas said in the statement.

K. waewaeroa was certainly a giant among penguins, but the species is emblematic to New Zealanders for other reasons, too, Thomas said. 

"The fossil penguin reminds us that we share Zealandia with incredible animal lineages that reach deep into time, and this sharing gives us an important guardianship role," he said. "The way the fossil penguin was discovered — by children out discovering nature — reminds us of the importance of encouraging future generations to become kaitiaki [guardians]."

The findings were published Sept. 16 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Originally published on Live Science.

Marine animals are swimming in circles, and the scientists who discovered the strange behavior don't know why.

Researchers have now observed green sea turtles, tiger sharks, penguins and Antarctic fur seals swimming in consecutive circles at a constant speed — a mystery the scientists think could be tied to the animals' ability to navigate by magnetism.

Researcher Tomoko Narazaki first recorded the behavior after moving a group of green turtles away from their breeding ground so that she could study how they would navigate back home. She found that, despite having a fixed destination in mind, the GPS-tracker-fitted turtles would often pause to swim in circles. 

"To be honest, I doubted my eyes when I first saw the data, because the turtle circles so constantly, just like a machine," Narazaki, of the University of Tokyo's Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, said in a statement. 

 Related: Photos: Butterflies drink turtle tears

The circling only intensified once the sea turtles had swum back to the coastal waters near their nesting beaches, with one turtle recorded to have circled up to 76 times in one go, with each loop lasting 16 to 20 seconds. 

After reporting her findings to colleagues who were using the same state of the art 3D tracking tags on other sea creatures, Narazaki was even more surprised to find that other scientists had observed similar behavior in various animals: Tiger sharks, king penguins, a whale shark, a Cuvier's beaked whale and a group of Antarctic fur seals were also doing it.

There's likely no singular explanation for the dizzy swimming. Some animals swam in circles near feeding grounds — like the 272 total circling events performed by just four tiger sharks tagged off the shores of Hawaii. Another tiger shark was recorded circling before it approached a female for courtship. Antarctic fur seals performed most of their underwater loops during the day, even though they mainly feed at night, and the green sea turtles seemed to be getting their spin on at certain junctures in their journeys. 

"What surprised me most was that homing turtles undertake circling behavior at seemingly navigationally important locations, such as just before the final approach to their goal," Narazaki said. 

Research has previously shown that green sea turtles can detect Earth's magnetic fields, so the circling behavior could be similar to the way submarines circle during geomagnetic observations, the team said. In that instance, circling allows an organism or sub to detect magnetic fields from multiple directions, and repeating the loop allows them to take repeated measurements.

The next steps for the team are to include more individuals and more species, and to investigate if navigation is the main reason for the mysterious behavior. 

The researchers published their findings March 18 in the journal iScience.  

Originally published on Live Science.

If you've ever lost track of your friends in a crowd, you'll likely empathize with the endearingly "confused" rockhopper penguin in a recent viral video. The bird became separated from a penguin group and began hopping away with a bunch of strangers; however, a penguin from the first group seemingly goes back to collect the stray, and everyone enjoyed a very hoppy ending.

The footage was posted on Jan. 9 by The Southern Barlows, a YouTube channel that shares clips of life in the Falkland Islands (also known as Islas Malvinas), according to an account description. The Falklands are an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean off the southern coast of Argentina, and approximately 320,000 breeding pairs of southern rockhopper penguins (Eudyptes chrysocome chrysocome) gather there annually from October until April, according to Falklands Conservation.

In the short video, one group of penguins bounces energetically downhill, probably going to the sea to fish, said Klemens Pütz, scientific director of the Antarctic Research Trust in Bremervörde, Germany. The mix-up happens when the penguins encounter and briefly mingle with a second group hopping in the opposite direction, likely returning from the ocean and heading back to the breeding colony, Pütz told Live Science.

Related: Charming chick photos: Antarctica's baby penguins 

Rockhoppers arrive at their Falkland Islands breeding grounds in October, and lay their eggs by mid-November, Pütz said. Chicks hatch about a month later and fledge by the end of February. Once breeding season ends, the parents molt and embark on their winter foraging journey. They stay exclusively at sea for six months and swim thousands of miles, dispersing south from coastal waters near the Falklands to the Straits of Magellan and Cape Horn, and to the north along the Patagonian Shelf, Falklands Conservation reported.

Even though the "confused" penguin in the video seems temporarily unable to tell which group is the right one, rockhoppers can identify their mates and chicks among tens of thousands in a colony, said Nicolás Alejandro Lois, a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Institute of Ecology, Genetics and Evolution of Buenos Aires. The birds find each other mostly by using call-and-response vocalizations and visual cues, during which "they stop, stand up straight and turn their heads around," Lois told Live Science in an email.

Rockhopper males and females pair up for several years (as happens in many penguin species), and some evidence suggests that they find each other by meeting at the same nest site every spring, "since the partners spend the winters separately," said Nina Dehnhard, a seabird ecologist with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Trondheim, Norway. That habit could explain why rockhopper penguins have a lower "divorce-rate" than emperor penguins, "which do not have a fixed nest site," Dehnhard said in an email.

When the penguins spend their breeding months in colonies, they often gather in small groups like those seen in the video, because trips to and from the ocean are safer with company. But there's no special bond between birds in such groups — they simply happen to be heading in the same direction at the same time, Pütz told Live Science.

"They're just a mixture of penguins. And next time, they're in a completely different group," Pütz said. When penguin groups heading in different directions run into each other, "confusion usually arises," Lois said in the email. "They are always prone to follow others, and that is always stronger than the original direction." 

And while the briefly disoriented penguin in the video did seem to receive some help from a concerned rockhopper, it's unlikely that the second penguin was truly demonstrating altruistic behavior. Rather, it was probably just as confused as the first, Pütz said. 

"I think it is just coincidence and appears to the human eye as if one of the penguins helps the other and gets him back on track," he said.

Originally published on Live Science.

 The world's (former) largest iceberg continues to break apart into smaller pieces on the doorstep of a major marine wildlife haven and home to millions of macaroni and king penguins in Antarctica. 

This comes less than a week after the mammoth iceberg, known as A68a, first split in two, Live Science recently reported. 

Scientists at the U.S. National Ice Center (USNIC) spotted the two newest pieces, A68e and A68f, on Dec. 22 using images from the Sentinel-1A satellite, according to a USNIC statement. This means that there are now four separate iceberg fragments, including A68d, which will eventually drift away from one another.

A68a became the world's largest iceberg when it split from Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf in July 2017, Live Science previously reported. The massive chunk of ice has been drifting northward ever since. As recently as April, it measured 2,000 square miles (5,100 square kilometers), or just over the size of the state of Delaware. 

Related: In photos: Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf through time

In the spring of 2020, A-68a set its sights on South Georgia Island, a wildlife refuge in the South Atlantic Ocean that's home to millions of penguins, seals and other marine wildlife. Experts feared that if it were to get stuck on the island's shallow sub-continental shelves, it could majorly interfere with the animals' ability to hunt for food.

"The actual distance [the animals] have to travel to find food (fish and krill) really matters," Geraint Tarling, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Society, said in a statement. "If they have to do a big detour, it means they're not going to get back to their young in time to prevent them starving to death in the interim."

However, it appears that those underwater shelves are actually what has caused it to start breaking apart. Before splitting in two, the iceberg began spinning clockwise, suggesting one end had been caught on the shelf. The force of this snag is believed to be behind that split and the more recent fracturing as well. 

Laura Gerrish, a GIS (geographic information system) mapping specialist at the British Antarctic Survey, estimated the areas of the new fragments, according to her post on Twitter:

• A-68a: 1,004 square miles (2,600 square km)
• A-68d: 56 square miles (144 square km)
• A-68e: 253 square miles (655 square km)
• A-68f: 87 square miles (225 square km)

It is now hoped that the biggest pieces will be carried north of the island on a fast-moving current known as the Southern Antarctic Circumpolar Current Front. However, if any of the pieces, or any potential new pieces, were to get caught on the shelves, they could still be big enough to cause disruption to the local wildlife, according to the BBC. 

Researchers will now continue to monitor the situation over the holiday season, while the island's inhabitants will hope for a non-white Christmas. 

Originally published on Live Science.

The world's largest iceberg has just broken in two, with a chunk of ice about the size of Queens and the Bronx combined splitting off from the main berg.

The mammoth A-68a berg first split from Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf in 2017,  Live Science previously reported. The giant hunk of ice has been drifting ponderously northward ever since. From the water, A-68a would look a bit like a moving island, with cliffs rising up to 100 feet (30 m) above sea level. As recently as April, it measured 2,000 square miles (5,100 square kilometers), or about as big as three Houstons plus one Chicago (or 1.7 Rhode Islands). 

Recently, this floating ice-land has been on a collision course with South Georgia Island, a wildlife refuge in the South Atlantic Ocean that's home to millions of penguins, seals and other wildlife. 

It's not clear exactly why the iceberg fractured, but a crash into the shallow seabed several dozen miles from the South Georgia shoreline may have caused the split, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

Related: 10 climate myths busted

The ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission captured A-68a's drift toward South Georgia in a series of images between Nov. 29 and Dec. 17.

It appears that in recent days the iceberg spun clockwise, moving one of its ends into shallow water, the ESA said. In that region, the seafloor is just 650 feet (200 m) deep, close enough to the surface for the bottom of the iceberg to have scraped against. In the process, the smaller piece — expected to take the name A-68d — likely snapped off.

It remains to be seen where the iceberg will go from here.

Past chunks of ice have traced similar paths north from the southernmost continent past South Georgia. But there is some concern that if A-68a remains offshore for too long, it could block the nearby waters where the penguins that live on the island feed. 

"The actual distance [the animals] have to travel to find food (fish and krill) really matters," Geraint Tarling, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Society, said in a statement. "If they have to do a big detour, it means they're not going to get back to their young in time to prevent them starving to death in the interim."

Future images and observations will likely reveal how much of a threat A-68a will end up posing to the waddling birds.

After A-68a's spectacular breakup, another iceberg, farther south in Antarctica's Weddell Sea, is now the world's largest at 1,500 square miles (4,000 square km), according to ESA. Its name is A-23a.

Originally published on Live Science.

On a dry, windy cape in southern Antarctica, the ground is strewn with dead, mummified penguins. The rocks around them are littered with bones, pebbles and guano stains — the telltale marks of a freshly abandoned Adélie penguin colony.

Scenes like this are common around Antarctica's Ross Sea, which is home to millions of Adélies and other thriving penguin populations. Still, the sight at Cape Irizar puzzled biologist Steve Emslie, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, when he visited in January 2016; he knew that Adélie penguins hadn't been spotted there in hundreds of years. Where had the remains of this ghostly colony suddenly materialized from?

Now, in a study published Sept. 18 in the journal Geology, Emslie offers an answer. A radiocarbon analysis of bones, eggshells and mummified skin samples collected at the site reveals that the seemingly fresh penguin remains at Cape Irizar are actually hundreds to thousands of years old. According to Emslie, the site has been occupied by breeding penguin colonies at least three times over the past 5,000 years, but the dessicated evidence of those occupations only just came to light, thanks to increasingly rapid snowmelt during Antarctica's ever-hotter summers.

Related: In photos: The emperor penguin's beautiful and extreme breeding season

"In all the years I've been working in the Antarctic, I've never seen a site like this before," Emslie told Live Science. "Mummies won't last on the surface in this windy area unless they've just been exposed."

Melting away the past

Antarctica — and especially the Antarctic Peninsula, on the northern tip of the continent — is one of the fastest-warming regions on Earth. When Emslie visited King George Island, just north of the peninsula, 10 years ago, he was astonished by the melt he saw.

"Just millions and millions of gallons of freshwater pouring into the ocean every day, just from one ice cap," Emslie said. "It's sad what's happening there."

Cape Irizar, deep in southern Antarctica along the frigid Ross Sea, is different. Average temperatures are much colder there, Emslie said, and global warming in the region has been less severe. Within the last decade, however, "streamlets" of meltwater have begun flowing from nearby glaciers, flushing away snow cover and exposing the rocky ground beneath, Emslie said.

That recent melting is what exposed the long-lost  Adélie penguin nests, Emslie wrote in his study. During his 2016 trip to the cape, he saw several mummified penguin chicks — withered and preserved by the dry air — sitting plainly on the ground at Cape Irizar. Mummies like these are a common sight at nesting sites in the area, Emslie said, but they don't last long in the windy air before collapsing. The mummies at Cape Irizar looked fresh, as did guano stains (penguin poop) scattered around the area. Nearby, large collections of pebbles had formed mounds — a common Adélie nesting behavior.

"The fresh remains on the surface looked like a modern colony. But no penguins have been recorded breeding there in historic times," Emslie said.

On a subsequent trip, Emslie and his colleagues excavated three of those newly-exposed pebble mounds, revealing dozens of chick bones and other remains. The researchers determined the age of these nests by analyzing the radioactive decay of an isotope, or version, of carbon within  seven of those bones, plus a handful of eggshells, feathers and skin samples.

That radiocarbon dating confirmed what Emslie had expected: The seemingly fresh penguin remains were actually ancient, ranging from 800 to 5,000 years old. The samples showed evidence of at least three different penguin "occupations" at the Cape Irizar site, the last one ending nearly a millennium ago.

"The latest occupation was the one on the surface," Emslie said. The remains of this colony were likely "covered by snow and ice, beginning during the Little Ice Age about 800 years ago," before finally being exposed by recent summer melt.

'Winners and losers'

According to Emslie, the past penguin occupations were likely tied to warm periods when nearby "fast ice" — or slabs of sea ice attached to the land — melted early in the summer, opening water access to the cape during Adélie breeding season. Penguins could have simply swam up to the cape and built nests on the beaches, Emslie said.

Today, fast ice around Cape Irizar melts too late in the season to make the area a viable nesting site. But that will probably change in the near future, Emslie said. As fast ice melts earlier each year in response to global warming, penguins will have more and more time to colonize the cape and start their breeding cycles. That's a good thing for the Adélie penguins of southern Antarctica; — but their northern cousins, which are rapidly losing their sea-ice habitats, will not fare so well.

"We talk about climate change 'winners and losers,'" Emslie said, referring to species that will either expand their populations because of climate change (winners) or be pushed toward extinction (losers). "Adélie penguins have the unique position of being both. While we see them declining in the Antarctic Peninsula, they're expanding or staying stable in East Antarctica and the Ross Sea."

The discovery of these ancient colonies is a reminder that penguins have been moving around Antarctica for millennia, Emslie said, migrating from cape to cape as sea ice ebbs and flows. But now, their habitat is changing more rapidly than ever before.

As warming escalates, the millions of penguins living in the northern Antarctic Peninsula may disappear in the next 20 years, he said, and Cape Irizar may once again become prime penguin property. Digging deeper into the cape and studying more remains of the ancient colonies that once lived there could provide a better clue of what's in store for the Adélies.

Originally published on Live Science.

If the Olympics awarded medals for long-distance pooping, penguins would take home the gold. 

These tubby, aquatic birds can squirt arcing jets of poop to distances nearly twice their own body length, and scientists recently calculated just how much force their tiny rectums produce in order to do so — and how far the poop can fly.

Over a decade ago, scientists had explored the pressure needed for chinstrap and Adelie penguins to expel poop along a mostly horizontal path, which they identified as penguins' most common poop direction. For a new study, which appeared on the preprint site arXiv on July 2 and has not been peer-reviewed, another team of researchers analyzed a different fecal trajectory in Humboldt penguins (Spheniscus humboldti), which often poop in a descending arc away from their nests on higher ground. 

Related: Photos of Flightless Birds: All 18 Penguin Species

The team of scientists who first addressed the penguin poo puzzle published their results in 2003, in the journal Polar Biology; that pioneering study won the authors an Ig Nobel Prize in 2005 for fluid dynamics. 

When a new team of researchers revisited the question, they expanded on the earlier results by recalculating internal pressures inside the penguin's gut and rectum, correcting for viscosity of the poo, and factoring in air resistance along an arcing trajectory. They then discovered that the forces at work were even more extreme than previously suggested. 

Pressure is measured in units called kilopascals (kPa), where 1 kPa is 1,000 newtons per square meter. In the new study, the scientists calculated that the pressure generated in the rectums of pooping penguins was as much as 28.2 kPa — about 1.4 times the estimate in the 2003 study.

"I was surprised by the extremely strong penguin's rectal pressure," said lead study author Hiroyuki Tajima, an assistant professor in the Department of Natural Science at Kochi University in Japan.

Though Humboldt penguins stand only 28 inches (71 centimeters) tall, the scientists discovered that the birds can generate enough poo-propelling energy to send fecal "bombs" flying at speeds of nearly 5 mph (8 km/h), landing up to 53 inches (134 cm) away. This achievement would be comparable to an adult human shooting their feces to a distance of more than 10 feet (3 meters), Tajima told Live Science in an email. 

Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow, lead author of the 2003 study, declared that he was "very pleased that other researchers have taken up our ideas to look into penguin pooping," according to Improbable Research, the humorous science organization that awarded Benno Meyer-Rochow the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize. 

The new study described the penguins expelling a fecal arc that curved upward before descending, which Benno Meyer-Rochow and his colleague had not seen in Adélie penguins. Nevertheless, "it is of course possible that either we missed that or that these penguins sometimes do that when they stand on an uneven rock and/or bend forward more than what we had observed," Benno Meyer-Rochow told Improbable Research.

Birds that eat meat or fish typically poop with more force than seed-eaters, likely because their waste contains higher amounts of irritating uric acid, Benno Meyer-Rochow wrote in a 2019 blog post.

While blasting poop jets helps penguins keep their nests tidy, their high-pressure pooping poses an occupational hazard for penguin caregivers in zoos and aquariums, the study authors reported. Their findings therefore have a practical side: helping wildlife experts who care for penguins to establish a foolproof "safety zone," so they can keep well out of range during the birds' explosive bathroom breaks, Tajima said.

Originally published on Live Science.

A pair of mated male penguins in a Dutch zoo were so eager for offspring that they stole an egg from another pair of penguins.

Two male black-footed penguins (Spheniscus demersus, also known as African penguins) at DierenPark Amersfoort zoo in the Netherlands were recently found incubating a purloined egg. Their nest — holding the stolen egg — was near a nest that belonged to a male and female penguin couple, zoo representatives said in a statement.

Hatching season was already underway for the zoo's penguin community, and the males likely swiped the egg from their breeding neighbors during "an unguarded moment," according to the statement. 

Related: 'Gay' Animals: 10 Alternative Lifestyles in the Wild

Some chicks in the zoo's penguin brood have already hatched, and animal caregivers are keeping a close eye on the male couple, who are taking turns warming their ill-gotten egg, DutchNews reported. But there's a chance the couples' dreams of parenthood may soon be dashed, as the stolen egg may not have been fertilized, according to DutchNews.

Prior to the Dutch penguins' egg-snatching antics, other same-sex penguin couples have canoodled their way into hearts around the world. Roy and Silo, male chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarcticus) who lived at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, were partners for six years; Skip and Ping, male king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus), consciously coupled at Zoo Berlin; and Sphen and Magic, young male gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua), found love in the Sea Life Sydney Aquarium in Australia. 

All three same-sex couples fostered eggs; Silo and Roy hatched their chick in 2004, while Sphen and Magic's chick — "Baby Sphengic" — hatched on Oct. 19, 2018, the aquarium announced on Twitter. But poor Skip and Ping remain childless: Despite their attention, their unfertilized egg "burst open" on Sept. 2, German news site The Local reported.

Penguins aren't the only birds that form homosexual relationships. More than 130 birds species are known for homosexual behavior, which can include complex courtship rituals, genital contact and even nesting together for years, Live Science previously reported. 

• In Photos: The Emperor Penguin's Beautiful and Extreme Breeding Season
• Charming Chick Photos: Antarctica's Baby Penguins
• Photos of Flightless Birds: All 18 Penguin Species

Originally published on Live Science.

Fish swam for their lives when they encountered a forbidding, ancient "monster" penguin that would have towered over today's largest penguin, the emperor, a new study finds.

The newly described aquatic beast, dubbed Crossvallia waiparensis, measured 5 feet, 3 inches (1.6 meters) tall, about the height of an adult woman. It weighed up to 176 lbs. (80 kilograms), packing on the pounds as it hunted aquatic prey around ancient New Zealand during the Paleocene epoch, 66 million to 56 million years ago.

But while this newfound species was huge, it isn't the largest penguin on record. That honor goes to the 37-million-year-old Palaeeudyptes klekowskii, which stood an impressive 6.5 feet (2 m) tall and weighed 250 lbs. (115 kg). 

Related: Photos: These Animals Used to Be Giants

Amateur paleontologist and study co-researcher Leigh Love found fossilized leg bones of the newfound penguin in the town of Waipara, located in Canterbury, New Zealand. This region is a hotspot of giant, ancient animals. Other humongous, but now extinct, creatures discovered there include the world's largest parrot, a giant eagle, a giant burrowing bat, the moa (a giant, flightless bird) and five other penguin species.

The emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) was a shrimp compared with C. waiparensis. The modern bird stands between 3 and 3.9 feet (0.9 and 1.2 m) tall. But the emperor is just a distant relative of the newly identified creature. C. waiparensis's closest known relative is Crossvallia unienwillia, which also lived during the Paleocene but in Cross Valley, Antarctica. Though the land masses are separate today, New Zealand and Antarctica were connected during the Paleocene, the researchers said.

"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," study senior researcher Paul Scofield, the senior curator of Natural History at Canterbury Museum in New Zealand, said in a statement.

Moreover, the leg bones of both Crossvallia penguins are starkly different from those of modern penguins. Anatomical studies suggest that Crossvalia either used their feet more in swimming than do modern penguins, or that the ancient birds hadn't yet adapted to standing upright, as today's penguins do.

The discovery of C. waiparensis and other large penguins dating to the Paleocene epoch offers more evidence that penguins became huge shortly after the extinction of the nonavian dinosaurs about 66 million years ago, study co-researcher Vanesa De Pietri, a research curator of Natural History at Canterbury Museum, said in the statement.

It's no wonder, either, as being big has huge advantages for marine birds, said Daniel Ksepka, a curator at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, who was not involved in the research.

"In general, the larger an animal gets, the more efficient they become at conserving body heat (very important in penguins) and diving deeper and for longer periods of time," Ksepka told Live Science in an email. "Large size also opens up new prey options and protects them from smaller predators."

So why are today's penguins smaller? It’s not totally clear, but good, old-fashioned competition for prey and territory might partly explain why penguins are no longer the giant behemoths they once were.

Related: 15 of the Largest Animals of Their Kind on Earth

"Paleontologists are still working on this question, but a big factor could be the rise of pinnipeds (seals and kin), who start spreading around the oceans about the same time giant penguins start disappearing," Ksepka said. "They may have clashed with penguins not only as predators and competitors for similar prey but also monopolized breeding grounds needed for nesting colonies."

The new study was published online Aug. 12 in the journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology. The ancient bird's fossils, as well as those of other giant penguins, will go on display at Canterbury Museum later this year.

• In Photos: The Emperor Penguin's Beautiful and Extreme Breeding Season
• Photos of Flightless Birds: All 18 Penguin Species
• Charming Chick Photos: Antarctica's Baby Penguins

Originally published on Live Science.

The second-largest colony of emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) in the world appears to be collapsing, after rough seas drowned all of its babies three winters in a row.

The Halley Bay colony once accounted for 5 to 9% of the global emperor penguin population, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAC), which reported the catastrophe. That amounted to about 15,000 to 24,000 adult breeding pairs. But in 2016, the sea-ice platform on which the colony was raising its babies collapsed during rough weather, throwing infant penguins unable to swim into the frigid water. In 2017 and 2018, the rough weather pattern repeated itself.

"For the last 60 years, the sea-ice conditions in the Halley Bay site have been stable and reliable," the BAC said in a statement. "But in 2016, after a period of abnormally stormy weather, the sea ice broke up in October, well before any emperor chicks would have fledged. This pattern was repeated in 2017 and again in 2018 and led to the death of almost all the chicks at the site each season." [In Photos: The Emperor Penguin's Beautiful and Extreme Breeding Season]

The birds arrive at the site from their summer sea jaunts each April to breed; for the resulting chicks to survive, the site has to remain stable throughout the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, which lasts until December. These findings, based on satellite images and published April 25 in the journal Antarctic Science, were verified when researchers visited the region.

By 2018, a handful of adults — a "few hundred," or about 2 percent of the original population — turned up at the Halley Bay site, the researchers reported. The remaining colony appeared in disarray, with adults moving closer to the ice edge than is typical, and was difficult to count scattered among the roughened chunks of ice.

"Whether the adult birds here were failed breeders or non-breeders is difficult to assess from imagery alone," the researchers wrote.

The good news is that at least some of the colony appears to have moved, rather than died out. The Dawson-Lambton Glacier colony 34 miles (55 kilometers) to the south has significantly swelled in numbers since the devastation of Halley Bay, the BAC reported. That colony, which had hit a low of just 1,280 pairs in the 2015 season, swelled in each succeeding year. In 2016, it reached 5,315 pairs. In 2017, there were 11,117 pairs. And by 2018, a full 14,612 pairs set up camp at the site.

Those numbers are still lower than the original Halley Bay total, but suggest that a significant number of penguins have figured out that it's better to move than return to the especially dangerous site.

Long-term, the researchers noted, there's reason to suspect bad winter weather might be a new climate-rated threat to penguin populations. While the data is incomplete, September 2016 included the lowest atmospheric pressure in the region for that month in 30 years, a driver of storm activity. At the same time, the average wind speed was the highest it had been in that time frame. This research, they wrote, will help them further understand how penguins will react to the world has it keeps warming and changing.

• In Photos: The Emperor Penguin's Beautiful and Extreme Breeding Season
• Charming Chick Photos: Antarctica's Baby Penguins
• Photos: Penguins Barely Survived Antarctic Volcano Eruptions

Originally published on Live Science.

The ultimate parents

The fifth episode of BBC America's new series, "Dynasties," follows a colony of several thousand emperor penguins as they brave the elements to breed and raise their young during Antarctica's ruthless winter. Catch the episode this Saturday, Feb. 16, at 9 p.m. EST/8 p.m. CST on BBC America. Viewers can still watch the first episode, "Lion," online for free.

All together now

In a gentle, slow dance, emperor penguin couples synchronize their movements to strengthen their bond. The couples have one of the strongest mating pair bonds in nature, which is vital for successfully raising their single offspring in one of the harshest environments on the planet.

A strong bond

A pair of emperor penguins court one another and form one of the strongest parental bonds in nature. The penguins take only one mate per year and may choose to return to the same mate year after year.

An awkward moment

Emperor penguins are perfectly designed for many things, but mating is not one of them. [Animal Sex: How Penguins Do It]

Huddle for warmth

Winter in Antarctica reaches temperatures of minus 47.7 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 44.2 Celsius) with wind speeds of 80 mph or more. Adult emperor penguins join together in a tight huddle for protection from the abusive conditions. Penguins on the outside of the huddle continuously push and shuffle around for a more protected position.

Braving the elements

Thousands of papa penguins huddle together for warmth during a severe winter storm. Once the female lays her egg, she leaves the egg with her male partner so she can go fishing. The male is left behind to keep himself and his egg warm and safe for several weeks during the dead of winter. [Read more about how emperor penguin dads keep their eggs from freezing]

A safe peek

A 2-week-old chick balances on its mother's feet and stays warm in her soft, feathered pouch. For several weeks, the chicks spend all of their time under the warm protection of their parents.

Find a buddy

When their parents leave to go fishing, the down-covered chicks take a tip from the adults and stay warm by huddling together. Here, a pair of 6-week-old fuzzballs snuggle up with one another.

Staying undercover

These fluffy 1-month-old chicks are too big to sit on their parents' feet, but the chicks are reluctant to give up their warm and cozy hideaway.

Using their resources

When their parents leave to go fishing, 2-month-old chicks surround an adult penguin much larger than them, to soak up the adult's warmth and use the larger bird as a windbreak.

Clear, colorful skies

The weather becomes a bit more bearable in the spring. The vibrant colors of the southern lights, the aurora australis, dance above the large colony of emperor penguin families.

Coming out

As the summer sun melts their icy home, the chicks begin to molt their downy feathers, and their sleek adult plumage grows in. Nearly grown, these young penguins will spend the next few years at sea before returning to breed and raise their own young.

They've become the stars of many a nature documentary and cartoon, beloved for their fluffiness and impeccable waddle. Yet, when it comes to breeding, you might say that emperor penguins have drawn the evolutionary short straw. As if life weren't already tough enough in the mostly frigid Antarctic landscape they inhabit, these birds also have to breed in the dead of winter, when they must shield their eggs from snow and roaring winds, lest the eggs turn into ice cubes.

This week's episode of BBC America's "Dynasties" follows a colony of emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) as they contend with this inhospitable climate to keep their fragile eggs alive.

The emperor is actually the only penguin species that follows the risky strategy of breeding solely in the winter, which they do in huge colonies of several thousand birds. While the female birds head out to sea for months to replenish themselves with fish after each one lays an enormous egg, the males stay behind and each incubate an egg as temperatures grow increasingly frigid on the flat sheet ice where they live. [In Photos: The Emperor Penguin's Beautiful and Extreme Breeding Season]

The reason for their wintertime breeding comes down to some very tight scheduling constraints. When several thousand hatchlings arrive in a penguin colony, they require tons of fish, squid and krill as sustenance. But that's available only in the springtime, when the vast stretches of frozen sea that separate emperor penguins from the ocean's edge melt and break apart.

And because incubating an egg takes around four months, "that means starting it in the winter, so the chick is then timed to hatch when maximum resources are available close by in the ocean," said Philip Trathan, head of conservation biology at the British Antarctic Survey. "If [penguins] were trekking over 200 kilometers [124 miles] of sea ice every foraging trip, they just wouldn't have time to do it," he told Live Science.

Saddled with the mammoth task of protecting their young against blizzards and subzero temperatures, emperor penguin dads have essentially been transformed by evolution into walking hot-water bottles.

For starters, the birds are almost completely covered in a dense layer of feathers that's several centimeters thick, which insulates their own bodies and their young. Like many penguin species, an emperor is also equipped with a flap of naked skin on its abdomen, called the "brood pouch," that protects the egg. A bird artfully balances an egg on its feet, presses it up against this bare skin and then covers the egg over with a fleecy fold of belly plumage that completely insulates the offspring from the frozen world outside.

Direct contact with the skin heats the egg via blood vessels that lie just beneath the surface, said Dominic McCafferty, a thermal ecologist at Glasgow University in Scotland. The brood pouch also has a biological bonus. "The skin itself is very rich in temperature-sensing neurons that pick up the temperature of [the egg]," McCafferty told Live Science. That attunes emperor dads to the well-being of their chicks, alerting them when eggs need a little extra coverage to keep them cozy.

But all of this relies on the father penguin being able to maintain his own insulation for the benefit of himself and his young. "One of the several adaptations that the emperor penguins have in particular is this ability to not lose heat to the surrounding environment," said Michelle LaRue, a lecturer in Gateway Antarctica in the department of geography at University of Canterbury in New Zealand, who specializes in the population dynamics of Antarctic species. Part of that is ensuring that they have as little contact with the ice as possible. [Why Is Ice Slippery?]

To accomplish that, the birds lift their feet off the ice, lean back into their heels and steady themselves with their tail tips. "They have this kind of like two-foot-tail tripod, so that the only things touching the ice are their heels and their tail — which I think is incredible," LaRue told Live Science. "They kind of look like they're in a rocking chair!" They adopt this posture for months on end, for the protection of their chicks. "They're incredibly resilient. I'm in awe of the way they make a living," LaRue added.

Thermal imaging studies show that the birds' bodies lose only tiny amounts of heat, mainly through the beak, eyes and feet. Their feathers are basically an incredibly sophisticated down jacket, which "keeps the center warm but allows very little heat to transfer through the feathers out to the surface," said McCafferty, who studies temperature regulation in these birds. In fact, he's shown in his research that the surface of the birds' feathers are actually cool — which suggests that they're conducting hardly any heat to the outside world; it's all trapped within.

"This tells us that their insulation is working very, very well," McCafferty said.

For extra heat insurance during the long months on the ice, the father birds use one last tactic: group hugs. Emperor penguins are famed for creating enormous huddles, wherein hundreds of birds jam together in a constantly circulating mass to ensure collective warmth. The underlying dynamics of these great groups are so complex that many biologists are still trying to understand how the gatherings work, McCafferty said.

But scientists do know why the birds do it. "Their sheer body heat is able to elevate the temperature of the air within the huddle," McCafferty said, adding that a group of French scientists has recorded air temperatures of more than 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) above the huddle.

Amid subzero conditions, the impressive heat of the huddle can help emperor dads slow their metabolism and reduce energy use, so they can continue warming their precious offspring, McCafferty explained.

While the common motif in nature documentaries of penguins huddled against howling winds may be designed to tug at our heartstrings, McCafferty said we needn't pity these birds or their tiny chicks. For humans, anything below 68 F (20 C) would feel a bit cool, but "this zone of comfort for emperor penguins probably extends down to something like minus 10 degrees Celsius [14 F]," he said.

"They're very well-adapted to these environments, and they're very successful at what they do," he said. These dedicated penguin dads, who manage to raise their young in probably the harshest place on Earth, certainly are proof of that. 

Narrated by Sir David Attenborough, BBC America's "Dynasties" gives viewers an up-close-and-personal look into the family lives of five of the most celebrated and endangered animals on the planet. The fourth episode, "Emperor," premieres Saturday (Feb. 16) on BBC America at 9 p.m. EST/8 p.m. CST. Viewers can watch the first episode, "Lion," for free online.

• How Does a Person Freeze to Death?
• How Can Boiling Water Turn into Snow?
• Why Are There So Many Pigeons?

Originally published on Live Science.

The bodies of hundreds of mummified penguins in Antarctica aren't a sign of an ancient illness that swept through the icy continent, nor are they the remains of a penguin massacre by a ravenous predator.

Rather, these penguins, who were mummified by the cold, dry Antarctica environment, likely died from weather on the opposite end of the spectrum: two extremely rainy and snowy events that happened over the past 1,000 years, a new study finds.

"It is quite likely that global climate warming caused enhanced precipitation, which led to the tragedy," said study lead researcher Liguang Sun, a professor of Earth science at the Institute of Polar Environment at the University of Science and Technology of China. [Charming Chick Photos: Antarctica's Baby Penguins]

The research team stumbled across the remains of the "preserved, dehydrated mummies," many of them chicks, in East Antarctica's Long Peninsula in 2016.

It's actually common to find the remains of dead Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae), including their feathers and bones, in Antarctica, Sun said. "But it is very rare to find so many mummified penguins, especially mummified chicks," Sun told Live Science in an email.

Radiocarbon dating revealed that these penguins died gradually over the course of decades, and this happened in two different periods, dating to about 750 and 200 years ago. After studying the sediment deposited around the mummies, which included penguin poop and nesting materials, the researchers concluded that "extreme climatic events" that spanned several decades led to the deaths of these penguins.

In addition, the researchers unearthed evidence indicating that floods from the heavy precipitation had carried the penguins' bodies, as well as the surrounding sediment, downhill.  

The surviving penguins later abandoned the nesting area, as shown by the small amount of sediment that was laid down after the mass casualties, the researchers said.

Penguin predictions

Learning how penguins fared during extreme climate events can help researchers predict what might happen to these birds in the future, the researchers, which included scientists from China and Australia, said. And these events don't give much cause for optimism. 

"Generally, it is believed that the current global warming trend will continue or even worsen," Sun said. As human-made climate change heats the planet, the Antarctic will see more rain and snow, which will likely "increase the chance of such massive death" among penguin populations, he said.

Adélie penguins are native to the Antarctic, where they currently have about 250 breeding sites, the researchers said. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the birds as a species of "least concern," meaning they're not currently threatened or endangered, but extreme weather events could put the birds in peril, the researchers said.

In addition to the historical accounts, current evidence shows that increased rain and snowfall can be lethal to the penguin chicks. For instance, during the 2013-2014 breeding season, "100 percent of the chicks of about 34,000 breeding penguins died during three events of incessant rainfall and continuous snowfall," the researchers wrote in the study.

Chicks have trouble surviving extreme rain and snow, because the youngsters have yet to grow waterproof plumage, meaning they can die from hypothermia after getting wet and cold. Moreover, massive snowfall can make it hard for breeding adults to find pebbles for their nests, as well as snow-free places to lay their eggs. Snow can be dangerous for incubating chicks that have yet to hatch, because melting snow can drown eggs and cause the chicks to have lower birth weights, the researchers said.

To avoid these mass penguin die-offs, "humankind needs to do more and slow the current global warming trend," Sun said.

The study was published online Aug. 28 in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Original article on Live Science.

A solar eclipse is scheduled for Friday the 13th, but most skywatchers will be out of luck without doing a bit of traveling.

Truth be told, not many people will see this partial eclipse, thanks to its location: The moon's shadow will mostly fall over the open ocean waters that lie between Australia and Antarctica — the region where the Indian and Pacific oceans merge. The people who will get a chance to see the moon take a small nibble out of the sun include those living in Australia, in a portion of the territories of South Australia and Victoria as well as those living on the island of Tasmania; watchers in New Zealand, on the southern tip of South Island as well as on Stewart Island; and observers located on a slice of East Antarctica. Hobart, Tasmania, will see about 10 percent of the sun's diameter eclipsed, while Melbourne, Australia, will see barely a nick in the sun's disk, amounting to just 2.5 percent eclipsed! (Note that the eclipse occurs Thursday, July 12 EDT, but Friday local time and GMT.)

In fact, the greatest eclipse — where only about one-third of the sun's diameter will be eclipsed by the passing new moon — will occur on Antarctica, near Peterson Bank, where an emperor penguin colony currently exists (although it may not in the future; the colony's exact location continually changes, due to changing ice conditions). [Solar Eclipse Guide 2018: When, Where & How to See Them]

So, perhaps more penguins than people will witness this eclipse.

The start of eclipse season #2

We are now into our second eclipse season of 2018. The eclipse seasons are actually less than six months apart, by about 19 days, so they keep falling back that much earlier each year. Last year, periods when eclipses could occur fell in February and August; this year, they have shifted to January and February, and July and August. Next year, they will have shifted back again, so that one will come in January and the second in July. Near the end of the year (Christmas Day), one eclipse will squeeze in to make a third eclipse season.

What is an eclipse season? 

It is a span of about a month, during which eclipses are possible at the new and full moons, because the line of the nodes of the moon's orbit is pointing near enough to the sun. The moon's orbit is tilted toward Earth's at an angle of just over 5 degrees, and the nodes are the two points at which the planes intersect — that is, at which the moon passes down or up through the plane that Earth revolves around the sun on, called the ecliptic plane.

Picture the moon's orbit as a coin held at a slope and remaining in the same orientation as it is carried all the way around the sun. Earth is at the center of the coin; the nodes are the two points on the coin's rim that are on the same ecliptic plane as Earth. If the moon is anywhere else on the rim, it is too high or too low to cast its shadow on Earth. 

The middle of this summer's eclipse season coincides with a total eclipse of the moon on July 27, and it is so central (the moon will pass almost straight through the middle of Earth's shadow) that we can also have two "marginal" solar eclipses — the first comes two weeks before the lunar one and the other solar eclipse comes two weeks after. 

A small shadow zone

Interestingly, the moon will also be very close to Earth during these celestial events; lunar perigee occurs just over 5 hours after new moon. This actually makes Friday's solar eclipse cover a yet smaller area of Earth's surface than it otherwise would, since the penumbra of the moon's shadow (its outer shadow), unlike the umbra, grows broader, the farther it is from the moon. Meanwhile, the moon's umbra, from where the great spectacle of a total eclipse would be seen, passes far beyond Earth, but misses the planet by more than one-third of Earth's radius — for an observer in the Antarctic, that part of the shadow is 1,400 miles (2,200 kilometers) aloft. 

In short, so far as solar eclipses go, this one is very "underwhelming." 

Joe Rao serves as an associate at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmers' Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for FiOS1 News, Lower Hudson Valley, New York. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Cats

Many prey-ambushing, nocturnal predators, including the cat (pictured here), have vertical-slit-shaped pupils.

This kind of pupil likely provides predators with the sharpest way to estimate distance between themselves and a tasty meal, the study found. Gauging this distance is important, because it helps the predator decide how far it needs to leap out to catch its prey.

[Images: See the World from a Cat's Eyes]

Chameleons

A chameleon can move each eye independently of the other, allowing the animal to simultaneously look in two different directions with a full 360-degree view.

Just like a camera lens with a zoom, chameleons can focus their eyes and enlarge what they are looking at, Live Science reported previously.

Giant clams

Giant clams (Tridacna) may be big, but their eyes are pinhole-size. Each clam has several hundred of these tiny eyes on the exposed part of its fleshy mantle, according a 2003 study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

When one of these clams detects dark objects moving nearby, it withdraws its mantle toward its shell, the study found.

Another clam, known as the disco clam (Ctenoides ales), has about 40 eyes. But its vision is poor; it couldn't even detect flashing reflected from a nearby disco clam, according to research covered by Live Science.

Crabs

Crabs are unable to move their eyes, but the creatures have an excellent visual field that helps them spot predators and prey.

For instance, the fiddler crab (Uca vomeris) can see all around itself, including overhead, according to a 2009 study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The eye cells on top of the crab's stalks can perceive light and dark, but not fine detail. "The crab only needs to see one dark spot moving in its upward vision to know it must run for its burrow," study co-author Jan Hemmi, a senior lecturer of biology at the University of Western Australia said in a statement.

Crocodiles

Like the cat, the crocodile is an ambush predator that has vertical-slit pupils to help it gauge distance when it attacks prey. The two animals also share another similarity: Both have nighttime vision.

The crocodile has a layer of reflective, mirrored crystals behind its retinas. During the day, a pigment in these crystals acts like a pair of sunglasses. But at night, the pigment cells retract, allowing the crystals to reflect light back onto the retina, amplifying the strength of the image. This allows the crocodile to essentially see in the dark.

Cuttlefish

When the cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) is exposed to bright light, its pupil takes on a W-like shape. But when the animal is in dim or dark waters, the cuttlefish's pupils become circular. Why does this happen?

According to a 2013 study in the journal Vision Research, the narrow, W-shaped pupil helps the cuttlefish balance uneven, vertically traveling light. This cuts down the amount of sunlight that is scattered across the cuttlefish's lens, making it easier for the animals to see contrasting images, the researchers of the study said.

Dragonflies

Dragonflies have sharp vision thanks to the large lenses in their compound eyes. Even better, these insects can see a wide array of colors.

Humans have trichromatic vision, a term that describes the red, blue and green light-sensitive proteins in our eyes. Dragonflies, in contrast, can see way more colors, including ultraviolet light. The insects have from 11 to 30 light-sensitive proteins in their eyes, according to a 2015 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at 12 species of dragonflies.

Goats

Goats have distinctive, rectangular-shaped eyes. But why?

The answer has to do with survival. A goat's oddly shaped pupils likely help it scan the horizon for predators, Live Science previously reported.

Human

The human eye resembles an old-fashioned camera. But instead of focusing light onto film, the eye's cornea (the clear structure at the front of the eye) and lens focus light onto the retina, tissue with light-sensitive proteins that can process black, white and different colors.

The place where the optic nerve enters the retina is called the blind spot. But don't despair: You can shrink the blind spot with eye-training exercises, a small 2015 study found.

Jumping spider

Despite their eight eyes, most spiders have bad vision. That's, in part, why they use webs to catch prey. But the jumping spider (Phidippus audax) is in a league of its own among spiders: It has excellent vision, which helps it pinpoint prey it can tackle.

The jumping spider can see almost 360 degrees around itself with its eight eyes. It uses the large, primary eyes on the front of its head to see detail and the small, secondary eyes to see motion, Live Science previously reported. [See photos of jumping spider eyes]

Leaf-tailed geckos

It's breathtaking to see leaf-tailed geckos' marbled eyes. These often have a background color of gold, silver or tan covered with concentric striations around the pupil, according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.

Geckos clean their gem-like eyeballs — which are either lidless or covered by clear eyelids — with a quick lick of the tongue.

Mantis shrimp

The mantis shrimp has a whopping 12 color receptors. (Remember, humans have just three.) But it appears that these crustaceans don't see a super-rainbow everywhere they go.

Rather, the shrimp can differentiate colors that are about 25 nanometers apart, a 2014 study in the journal Science found. In contrast, humans can discriminate shades that are as little as 1 nanometer to 4 nanometers apart, Live Science previously reported. In other words, the mantis shrimp can still see a ton of colors, but it can't differentiate between them as well as humans can.

"They're definitely not seeing the world of color in as much detail as other animals," study researcher Justin Marshall, a neurobiologist at the University of Queensland in Australia, told Live Science.

[In Photos: Mantis Shrimp Show Off Googly Eyes]

Owls

Owls are known for their amazing eyes. The birds of prey have tubular, telescope-like eyes that are jam-packed with rod cells, photoreceptor cells that perceive black and white. These help the birds hunt during the dim twilight and night hours, Live Science previously reported.

Owls also have a tapetum lucidum, a structure that reflects visible light back onto the retina, helping the animals see at night, Live Science reported.

Tarsiers

The tarsier's eyes are so large that each eye is as large as the animal's brain. There's a reason for this odd feature: The nocturnal primate can't see at night (unlike the owl and cat, it doesn't have a tapetum lucidum), so it needs big eyes to let in what little light is available.

Penguins

Penguins have extraordinary eyes that help them hunt underwater and explore on land.

Penguins have flattened corneas, which refract (bend) light less than human corneas do. In effect, it's up to a penguin's lens, not the animal's cornea, to focus light onto the retina. Luckily, penguins are well-adapted to do that. They also have strong eye muscles that can change the shape of the lens when the birds are on land or in the water, according to the New England Aquarium.

What's more, the birds have clear eyelids, called nictitating membranes, that protect their eyes when they're swimming underwater, the aquarium said. These adaptations help penguins see wherever they go!

Live Science sat down with Cooke yesterday (April 17) to explore the wild interactions and historical misunderstandings humans have had with animals dating to the time of Aristotle. And believe us when we say there are misunderstandings. So. Many. Misunderstandings. 

For instance, people had no idea for centuries where the stork and other birds went in the winter. Nowadays, we know that these birds migrate to warmer places. But before this was widely known or accepted, the 17th-century scientist and minister Charles Morton proposed another idea: Storks flew to the moon "in one great flock," he wrote, according to Cooke's book. [In Photos: The Amazing Penguins of Antarctica]

This incredible journey took the stork about 60 days, each way, giving the birds enough time to spend four months on Earth and four months on the moon, Morton incorrectly calculated. Granted, "here, he failed to account for the fact that the velocity required for his space-traveling storks to leave Earth's gravitational pull would be some 200 times his calculated top speed, a feat unachievable without the help of NASA's finest rocket boosters bound to the birds' backs," Cooke wrote.

In all, Cooke explores the odd histories of 13 animals: eel, beaver, sloth, hyena, vulture, bat, frog, stork, hippo, moose, panda, penguin and chimpanzee.

These tales include the true-life story of how a psychologist at the University of Oklahoma adopted a chimpanzee to an attempt to raise her like a human, and how Sigmund Freud tried, in vain, to discover the testicles of the eel. Then, she contrasts these stories with new research that's going on today, including researchers who study chimp communication in the primates' native habitat, rather than in a laboratory.

"I'd hope that the book helps us understand animals on their own terms," Cooke told Live Science, "and to appreciate them for what they are and not what we want them to be."

Original article on Live Science.

The best-dressed animals may also be the vainest — at least if their propensity for selfies is any indication.

A new video shows two emperor penguins in Antarctica interacting with a camera left on the ice, and the result is even cuter than you'd expect.

Explorer Eddie Gault left the camera behind at the Auster emperor penguin rookery, near Australia's Mawson research station in East Antarctica.

A pair of the fluffy penguins soon made the most of the camera to preen and pose, producing some of the most adorable footage on the continent. The camera first focuses on the feet of the two pudgy penguins as they waddle toward it ­— but the birds soon nudge the camera upward to focus on their faces. (And yes, even bird beaks look larger in selfies.) The penguins then make several vocalizations, as if to say, "Look what I found!"    

Emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) are the biggest of all penguin species, weighing up to 88 lbs. (40 kilograms) and standing up to 45 inches (1.1 meters) tall, according to National Geographic. These tuxedo-clad birds breed and feed on sea ice in at least 46 different colonies on Antarctica.

A 2009 satellite-image-based survey found 595,000 individuals on the continent. But because climate change is expected to transform the landscape and dramatically reduce the extent of their sea ice habitat, the species is listed as near threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).  

Originally published on Live Science.

Explorers beware: The Danger Islands — a remote handful of rocks huddled among sheets of treacherous sea ice near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula — are full of penguins. One might not imagine penguins to be dangerous per se, but then again, one has probably never seen (or smelled) 1.5 million of them breeding at once. According to a new paper published today (March 2) in the journal Scientific Reports, that's about how many Adélie penguins were recently found nesting in a previously unknown "supercolony" on the seldom-studied Danger Islands.

Discovered on an expedition led by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the unexpected penguin metropolis marks one of the single largest Adélie colonies in the world (they are native only to Antarctica), and disputes previous observations that the penguins have been steadily dwindling in numbers for the past 40 years. [In Photos: The Adorable Adélie Penguins of Antarctica]

"Not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, they also appear to have not suffered the population declines found along the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula that are associated with recent climate change," study co-author Michael Polito, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, said in a statement.

The team's discovery started, as many great discoveries do, with guano (that is, seabird poop).

While looking at NASA satellite imagery of the Danger Islands, researchers noticed significant guano stains on the rocks, pointing to the existence of some huge, unseen population of penguins. The researchers mounted an expedition in 2015 and, sure enough, encountered hundreds of thousands of Adélie penguins nesting in the rocky soil there.

The researchers tallied the penguin population using a combination of hand-counting, drone footage and a neural-net-counting program that analyzed massive composite photos of the island to pick out penguin nests from the surrounding scenery. The team's final tally: 751,527 penguin pairs — or slightly more than 1.5 million birds.

The discovery of this unexpected penguin-opolis is optimistic news for scientists who have observed Adélie penguin populations steadily declining in Antarctica for the past 40 years, the new study noted. The colony's existence on such a remote island, however, provides more questions than answers.

"The population of Adélies on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula is different from what we see on the west side," study co-author Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at WHOI, said in the statement. "Is it linked to the extended sea ice condition over there? Food availability? That's something we don't know."

What researchers do know, at least, is that there is yet one more reason (or rather, 1,500,000 more reasons) to enshrine the waters near the Antarctic Peninsula as a marine-protected area (MPA) — a region where human activity is legally limited for conservation purposes. A proposal to recognize the Danger Islands area as an MPA is currently under consideration by the international Commission for the Conservation of the Antarctic Marine Living Resources.

Originally published on Live Science.

What kind of private meerkat business takes place below the ground in their tunnels and dens — places that have never been observed firsthand by humans?

What does a fish-hunting ocean dive look like to a penguin, and what's a chimpanzee’s view from the treetops?

These and other questions about the previously unknown habits of wildlife are answered for the first time in "Animals with Cameras, A Nature Miniseries," produced by the BBC. The first episode will air nationwide in the U.S. tonight (Jan. 31) on PBS at 8 p.m. EST. [Photos: Hidden Cameras Find Diverse Animals in Tropical Forests]

In this pioneering three-part documentary, filmmakers and camera designers partnered with biologists to capture unprecedented animal perspectives on land and in the oceans — including cheetahs, bears, seals and devil rays — using custom-built equipment. By outfitting animals with wearable cameras that were smaller, lighter, more sensitive and more durable than ever before, they captured high-definition footage that allows viewers to see the world through a wild animal's eyes.

Customized cameras

To reveal habitats from an animal's point of view, the filmmakers turned to a new generation of cameras, which were designed to be comfortable for a range of animal species to wear; tough enough to withstand "exploration"; and with enough battery life to shoot for hours at a time, Chris Watts, cameraman at British Technical Films and camera designer for "Animals with Cameras," told Live Science.

Wearability and battery longevity were especially important for opening a window into the animals' interactions with each other, he explained.

"A lot of thought went into the camera mounts, and how they would attach and drop off. And the weight of cameras — we had to keep them as light as possible," Watts said.

For animals that were habituated to humans, such as the meerkats, the cameras could be attached and removed by hand, while with others — bears and devil rays, for example — the cameras were collected after a timed release.

Technical challenges and unexpected discoveries

In the first episode, cameras were fitted to meerkats in the Kalahari Desert, Magellanic penguins in South America and chimpanzees in Cameroon. Each group presented technical challenges — for the meerkats, the cameras had to be small enough for the animals to carry, but had to have enough battery life to shoot for hours in dim tunnels underground. Meanwhile, the penguin cameras, which had to be small and light, too, also had to be capable of shooting the penguins' speedy, ocean-foraging dives in deep, dark water.

But only the chimpanzees were so curious about the cameras — which hung around their necks — that they fought over who would get to wear them, "because everyone wanted one," Buchanan recalled.

"We had to create dummy cameras, so that every chimpanzee could get one," he said.

The team also needed to repeatedly update the cameras' designs to keep the chimps interested, Mimi Swift, a chimpanzee caregiver with the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, told Live Science in an email.

"They got bored of them as soon as they had been thoroughly investigated and strength tested/destroyed, which meant we had to constantly modify them purely to keep them interesting to the chimps," she said.

But it was worth the effort. Footage of the chimps high in the treetops revealed an unprecedented glimpse of foraging and nest-building behavior, and showed the young chimpanzees developing important social skills, Swift wrote in the email. [Photos: Hidden Cameras Find Diverse Animals in Tropical Forests]

Meerkat pups and penguin dives

The meerkat footage also held surprises for the scientists. Underground at night, they were found to be unexpectedly active and vocal, calling to locate their pups and other adults, Laura Meldrum, project manager of the Kalahari Meerkat Project, told Live Science.

But the most exciting discovery was the sight of meerkat pups that were only a few hours old. Previously, the youngest pups ever seen by researchers were at least 2 to 3 weeks old, Meldrum said.

And witnessing real-time, high-definition hunting footage of Magellanic penguins as they dove after their prey was "like taking off a blindfold," Rory Wilson, a professor of zoology at Swansea University in the U.K., told Live Science.

A swimming penguin is near-impossible to observe from a boat or even from the water — "they whizz right past you," he said — and while it's possible to attach devices to the birds that gather data on their movements, underwater footage has traditionally been very poor, according to Wilson.

"It gets too dark very rapidly, it's blurry, and it makes you sick to watch it," he said.

But the new footage was exceptional. Seeing what the penguins saw as they were hunting provided critical missing information about their choices between different prey animals in the open ocean, offering a vital clue to understanding their impact on marine environments, Wilson said.

Connection and protection

Footage that captures these rare and exciting glimpses of animals' hidden habits is important to scientists, but documentaries like "Animals with Cameras" also resonate with audiences, connecting them with the beauty — and peril — of wildlife in their natural environments. Forging these connections is especially vital now, when so many creatures' habitats worldwide are threatened by human activity and human-driven climate change, wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan told Live Science.

"We can only truly protect something if we know how it lives on this planet," he added.

"Animals with Cameras, A Nature Miniseries" airs nationwide in the U.S. on Wednesdays from Jan. 31 through Feb. 14, 2018, at 8 p.m. EST on PBS (check local listings). Each episode will be available to stream the following day at pbs.org/nature and on PBS apps.

Original article on Live Science.

The fossils of a refrigerator-size penguin were so gargantuan that the scientists who discovered them initially thought they belonged to a giant turtle. The ancient behemoth is now considered the second-largest penguin on record.

The newfound penguin species would have stood nearly 6 feet tall (1.8 meters) and weighed about 220 lbs. (100 kilograms) during its heyday tens of millions of years ago.

The bird's gigantism indicates that "a very large size seems to have developed early on in penguin evolution, soon after these birds lost their flight capabilities," said study co-lead researcher Gerald Mayr, a curator of ornithology at the Senckenberg Research Institute, in Germany. [In Photos: The Amazing Penguins of Antarctica]

At first, the researchers thought the penguin fossils belonged to a turtle, said study co-lead researcher Alan Tennyson, a vertebrate curator at the Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa Tongarewa), who discovered the fossil with paleontologist Paul Scofield on a beach in New Zealand's Otago province in 2004.

But shortly after a fossil technician began preparing the specimen in 2015, he found a part of the shoulder blade, known as the coracoid, which revealed that the fossils came from a penguin, Tennyson told Live Science.

Further analysis dated the penguin to between 55 million and 59 million years ago, meaning that it lived a mere 7 million to 11 million years after an asteroid slammed into Earth and killed the nonavian dinosaurs, Mayr said.

The researchers named the late-Paleocene penguin Kumimanu biceae. Its genus name, Kumimanu, was inspired by the Maori indigenous culture of New Zealand. In the Maori culture, "kumi" is a mythological monster, and "manu" is the Maori word for "bird." The species name, biceae, honors Tennyson's mother, Beatrice "Bice" A. Tennyson, who encouraged him to pursue his interest in natural history.

K. biceae didn't look much like modern penguins. Although researchers could not find its skull, they "know from similarly aged fossils that the earliest penguins had much longer beaks, which they probably used to spear fishes, than their modern relatives [do]," Mayr told Live Science. Like its modern cousins, however, K. biceae would have already developed typical penguin feathers, waddled with an upright stance and sported flipper-like wings that helped it swim, he added.

Researchers have discovered other ancient penguin fossils in New Zealand, including those of Waimanu manneringi, which lived about 61 million years ago. However, the largest penguin on record is Palaeeudyptes klekowskii, which lived about 37 million years ago in Antarctica. P. klekowskii stood about 6.5 feet (2 m) tall and weighed a whopping 250 lbs. (115 kg), according to a 2014 study in the journal Comptes Rendus Palevol (Palevol Reports).

Given that the Antarctic penguin was larger than K. biceae, it's likely that "giant size evolved more than once in penguin evolution," Mayr said.

K. biceae is a "cool fossil," said Daniel Ksepka, a curator at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, who was not involved in the research. "It's very old; it's almost as old as the oldest known penguins anywhere," Ksepka told Live Science. "That shows that [penguins] got big really quickly. And it all seems to have happened in New Zealand." [Photos of Flightless Birds: All 18 Penguin Species]

But why was New Zealand a penguin paradise? The archipelago was surrounded by fish for penguins to eat, and it originally had no native mammals (although today it's home to many sheep, weasels and domestic pets), meaning that there were no predators to bother the penguins when they came ashore to molt their feathers and lay eggs, Ksepka said.

The study was published online today (Dec. 12) in the journal Nature Communications.

Original article on Live Science.

Adélie penguins in Antarctica nest in large colonies, and these groupings leave behind massive poop stains on the icy landscape — marks that are so large they can be tracked by satellites.

For more than 30 years, scientists have used these poop (known as guano) stains as markers to monitor the status of penguin populations. NASA's Earth-observing Landsat satellites have enabled researchers to track penguin populations and find dozens of previously unknown colonies. Scientists have collected Landsat data, along with data from finer-resolution commercial satellite imagery and field research, into an online database that follows Adélie penguins across Antarctica.

The guano-tracking satellites have helped researchers discover some large colonies in areas like the Danger Islands, which are rarely surveyed because sea-ice cover makes travel to the islands difficult. [In Photos: Adélie Penguins of East Antarctica]

"We're far from a point where satellites are going to make fieldwork irrelevant. Instead, it has made fieldwork more efficient," Heather Lynch, an ecologist at Stony Brook University in New York who works on the satellite project, said in a statement.

Lynch and NASA scientist Mathew Schwaller, who first suggested using Landsat to track penguin droppings, have used satellite images to identify thousands of penguins that were not previously accounted for. The algorithm, developed by Schwaller, pinpoints rocks in parts of Antarctica that have the color marker of guano stains: a pinkish hue.

On Brash Island alone, the scientists counted roughly 166,000 penguins. Another 23,000 penguins were found on Earle Island and 7,000 on Darwin Island, all thanks to the automated technique that searches for penguin guano in satellite images.

According to the researchers, the satellite algorithm detects 97 percent of penguins in Antarctica. However, the satellite searches alone may not detect smaller penguin colonies, because Landsat images have a pixel size equivalent to a square about 98 feet by 90 feet (30 meters by 30 meters) in size. Field observations and finer-resolution imagery are therefore still necessary to help detect colonies that have fewer than 3,000 breeding pairs, NASA said.

Original article on Live Science.

Science advocates around the world turned out in droves to take part in the March for Science over the weekend, and the demonstration even found support from members of the animal kingdom: African penguins at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California took part in a mini March for Science, waddling around in support of the cause.

The "March of the Penguins for Science," as the aquarium called it, included five African penguins taking an "enrichment walk" with staff and volunteers joining in. Some of the onlookers held signs, including ones saying, "Science gives us happy feet," and "Honk honk, bray bray, African penguins are here to stay." [In Photos: The Best Signs from the 2017 March for Science]

African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) are an endangered species, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) "Red List" of threatened species. The IUCN notes that these penguins have experienced a very rapid population decline due to commercial fishing and changes in the birds' prey populations.

"Of course, the birds appreciate all the science that's done around the planet to figure out how to best help them," an aquarium representative who narrated the video said. "In particular, 'climate science: because extinction in a bummer' [as one sign read]."

The Facebook video of the penguins waddling in solidarity had more than 2.6 million views by this afternoon (April 24).

On Saturday (April 22), tens of thousands of people joined the March for Science on Earth Day, a global movement that brought scientists and science advocates onto the streets to convey how important science is to the health and safety of the planet's inhabitants.

Organizers of the global March for Science movement said the event was a first step "to defend the vital role science plays" in all aspects of life. While the march represented all sciences, one aspect of the movement was protesting the U.S. government's elimination of environmental protections and initiatives to mitigate climate change.

In his proposed 2018 budget, President Donald Trump put forward a plan to make unprecedented cuts to the sciences. The largest proposed cut was to the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, a 31 percent reduction from current funding levels. This proposed cut would remove programs such as Energy Star (which helps consumers find energy-efficient products and buildings) and Targeted Air Shed Grants (which help limit pollution at the local level).

Original article on Live Science.

It took hundreds of years for one of the oldest and largest penguin colonies in Antarctica to recover after three separate volcanic eruptions nearly wiped the seabird colony off the map, a new study finds.

Researchers made the discovery by examining a sediment core from a lake on Ardley Island, off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. By analyzing the core's geochemical layers, they were able to gauge how much volcanic ash and guano (bird poop) was present at different time periods throughout history.

The analysis revealed that three massive eruptions — which occurred about 5,300; 4,300; and 3,000 years ago on nearby Deception Island — nearly decimated the population of gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) on Ardley Island. [See Photos of the Gentoo Penguins and Sediment Cores]

It took the colony between 400 and 800 years to recover to full population levels after each eruption, the researchers found.

Accidental finding

The team initially began the study to understand the consequences of climate change along the coastline of western Antarctica, said lead study researcher Stephen Roberts, a quaternary scientist with the British Antarctic Survey. Roberts studies the Quaternary period, which covers two epochs: the Pleistocene (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) and the Holocene (11,700 years ago to the present).

While analyzing several sediment cores from the South Shetland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula to gather information about deglaciation and past climate and sea level changes, the scientists noticed one core in particular: an 11.5-foot-long (3.5 meters) sample from Ardley Island. The core, due to the process of new sediment layers being laid down over time, documented a time span dating back 8,500 years.

"[It] had some unusual and interesting changes in geochemistry that were different from those we had seen in other lake sediment cores from the area," Roberts told Live Science in an email. "We also found several penguin bones in the Ardley Lake core."

Intrigued, they studied the core further. Their analyses revealed that the gentoo penguin colony began living on Ardley Island about 7,000 years ago, about 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, Roberts said. Moreover, the penguins  — about 5,000 breeding pairs during peak population periods long ago — had generally favorable climate and sea-ice conditions during that time period, except for when the volcano periodically blew up.

Massive eruptions

The volcano's eruptions were enormous, at about a value of at least 3 or 4 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), Roberts said. To put that into perspective, the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington in 1980 had a VEI of 4, "so the level of eruption 'explosivity' is possibly equivalent in scale," Roberts said. (The 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption is considered the most destructive volcanic eruption, economically speaking, in U.S. history, scientists have said.)

The ash from these explosions would have been deadly for the nearby penguin colony. The toxic ash might have killed them outright, either directly by falling on the birds, or indirectly through starvation or habitat disturbance, Roberts said. However, it's possible that some adult penguins swam away and set up camp elsewhere, he said.

In addition, there is evidence — from guano in the sediment core — that some penguins struggled through the catastrophic eruptions and stayed there, Roberts noted.  

"Mature individuals on long forages would have the best chance of survival," he said. "If the eruption occurred during [the] breeding season, the chicks and juvenile penguins would be trapped on the island. If parents didn't return from foraging, then the colony could collapse quite quickly." [Images: Adélie Penguins Cope with Changing Sea Ice Conditions]

It's unsurprising that it took the penguins so long to re-establish their colonies, Roberts added.

"Suitable nesting sites and materials to build nests can also be buried, meaning that the island could remain essentially uninhabitable for a long time afterwards," he said.

While the volcano on Deception Island had three violent eruptions during the past 8,500 years, the volcano's eruptions from about 2,000 years ago to the present have been much smaller, Roberts said.

The study was published online today (April 11) in the journal Nature Communications.

Original article on Live Science.

Rough life

A volcano on Antarctica's Deception Island nearly wiped out one of the continent's largest and oldest penguin populations ... not once but three times throughout history. Ash from an 8,500-year-old a sediment core shows that the volcano erupted about 5,300; 4,300; and 3,000 years ago. By measuring guano (bird poop) samples in the core, scientists found that these eruptions nearly decimated the penguin colony.

However, the colony was resilient. It bounced back every time, although it took between 400 and 800 years to do so. [Read the full story on the penguins affected by the volcano]

Ardley Island

These maps show where the researchers conducted their fieldwork.

Pebble time

Gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) collect pebbles for their nests. Today, there are about 5,000 breeding pairs of gentoo penguins on Ardley Island in Antarctica.

Chilling out

Gentoo penguins nest on the ice-free rocks of Ardley Island. By looking at core samples, the researchers determined that gentoo penguins have lived on Ardley Island for almost 7,000 years, which is 1,000 years longer than previously thought.

Upward bound

A gentoo penguin climbs the slope leading to its nesting colony on Ardley Island. When the volcano on Deception Island had three big eruptions in the past, the toxic and abrasive ash released would have been deadly for penguin chicks. They would have been too young to escape into the surrounding frigid waters.

Wings out

A gentoo penguin nesting on Ardley Island. Nowadays, the volcano on Deception Island doesn't erupt with as much force as it used to, meaning that penguin researchers can instead spend time worrying about other issues affecting the water birds, such as climate change.

Sediment core

Notice the volcanic ash layers in the lake sediment cores taken from Kiteschee Lake on Fildes Peninsula. The small ash layers correspond with small eruptions from the volcano on Deception Island in the last 2,000 to 3,000 years.

The largest eruptions in the core sample from Fildes Peninsula and Ardley Island happened about 7,000 years ago and about 5,500 to 4,500 years ago. By studying these core samples, the researchers determined that these eruptions spewed more than 3 feet (1 meter) of ash into the air.

[Read the full story on the penguins affected by the volcano]

Millions more Adélie penguins are waddling along the icy Antarctic continent than scientists previously thought.

Researchers had estimated that about 2.3 million Adélie penguins called East Antarctica home. But a new survey more than doubles that estimate, to 5.9 million individuals in that area.

A team of scientists completed a comprehensive count of the penguin population using aerial and ground surveys, tagging data and automated cameras during several breeding seasons.

The new estimation is the first to take into account nonbreeding penguins; previous population counts focused only on breeding pairs. [In Photos: Adélie Penguins of East Antarctica]

"Nonbreeding birds are harder to count because they are out, foraging at sea, rather than nesting in colonies on land," Louise Emmerson, a seabird ecologist with the Australian Antarctic Division of the Australian government's Department of the Environment and Energy, said in a statement. "However, our study in East Antarctica has shown that nonbreeding Adélie penguins may be as, or more, abundant than the breeders. These birds are an important reservoir of future breeders, and estimating their numbers ensures we better understand the entire population's foraging needs."

Based on the new estimation of 5.9 million Adélie penguins in East Antarctica, the global population of this species (Pygoscelis adeliae) is likely 14 million to 16 million birds, the researchers said. (This species lives along Antarctica's entire coast and on its small islands.)

The study also revealed that, as the penguins seek out rocky, ice-free areas in which to nest, the birds move closer to human activity. Research stations in Antarctica similarly require rocky, ice-free spots because they provide easier access to resupply vehicles. There are nine permanently occupied research stations in such areas of East Antarctica, and the researchers found that more than 1 million birds breed within about 6 miles (10 km) of a station.

"By identifying significant penguin breeding populations near stations, we can better identify which areas may need enhanced protection into the future," said lead author Colin Southwell, a seabird ecologist with the Australian Antarctic Division.

By better understanding penguin population numbers and threats to their environment, conservationists can also help protect the penguins' food chain. Researchers estimate that Adélie penguins eat about 193,500 tons (175,500 metric tons) of krill and 18,000 (16, 300 metric tons) tons of fish during each breeding season. With these more comprehensive estimates, organizations such as the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources can set sustainable fishery catch limits to ensure the population remains stable, the researchers said.

The findings have yet to be published in a scientific journal.

Original article on Live Science.