The adorable trivial penguins ( Eudyptula minor)of southern Australia , the continent ’s only surviving penguin species , manage to support a large touristry industriousness single - flippered . Once , however , Australia was bless with many of the flightless birds , and a fresh field suggests jumbo penguin survived there long after they had died out everywhere else .
Australia and Antarctica single out from each other around 80 million years ago , opening up muckle of ocean . The first penguin coinage appeared around the sentence the dinosaur became extinct , and made good manipulation of both shoring of this widen disconnect , diversify dramatically . After a while , however , many of these shuttle , especially the larger ones , died out .
Travis Park , a PhD bookman at Monash University , has been seek to piece together Australia ’s use in this , publish his determination inPLOS One , a twenty-four hour period after World Penguin Day .
Central to Park ’s work is a single bone retrieved from the limestone of western Victoria . This get along from a species describe in 1959 namedAnthropodyptes gilli . Based on the sizing of the bone , the penguin it belonged to would have been 1.4 to 1.5 metre ( 4.7 to 5 feet ) tall , which Park pointed out to IFLScience is 50 percent taller than the prominent penguin live today .
Travis Park with the humerus of an A. gilli , an emperor penguin and a modern piffling penguin . Ben Healley
Such giant penguin were common on every southerly continent 23 million class ago , but Park tell IFLScience that previous studies of the bone had failed to “ put the find in setting . ” At 18 million eld old , A. gilliindicates that Australia ’s jumbo penguins outlasted their twin by at least 5 million long time .
" The preceding 20 years has see a renaissance in our savvy of penguin evolution , ” Park said in astatement . “ However , Australian fogey penguins have , until now , been left out of this planetary picture and no - one has know where they gibe into the account . Our newspaper is the first attempt at putting the absent slice of this puzzle in place . ”
Park conclude that rather than penguins arriving in Australia once before diversifying , there were several dissemination where new species get in from elsewhere over the course of jillion of yr . “ There is no grounds suggesting that any of the Australian taxonomic group are more closely related to each other than to other taxa , although more pure remains of these taxon may reveal a sister group human relationship between some species , ” the paper reports .
“ Several different types of elephantine penguin colonise Australia before eventually disappearing around 18 million twelvemonth ago . Since then pocket-sized penguins have been the norm , although modern penguins do not seem to have reached Australia until relatively lately , ” Parksaid .
The disappearing of other giant mintage coincided with the release of many marine mammals , something Park said may have been related to major changes in sea stratum at the sentence . Australia ’s closing off possibly protectedA.gillifor a tenacious while , and Park tell IFLScience it was not cleared why the species finally died out .
souvenir of other giant penguins might have survived withA. gilli , but they remain unexplored in the less explored part of Australia ’s southerly coastline .
