Fossilised big red penguin discovered

Sam Jones

Scientists have discovered the fossilised remains of an enormous red-feathered penguin that cast a long shadow across the shores of Peru 36 million years ago.

The fossil of the bird, which were discovered by Peruvian student Ali Altamirano in the Paracas national reserve on the country's southern coast, could help explain how its modern descendants evolved.

The new species — known as Inkayacu paracasensis, from the Quechua for water king — was nearly one-and-a-half metres tall, making it twice the size of its largest living relative, the emperor penguin.

Its plumage was as distinctive as its stature. Feathers attached to the bird's wing reveal that it would have been reddish-brown and grey in contrast with the black-and-white of living penguins.

After finding a patch of scaly, soft tissue preserved on one of the penguin's flippers, the team nicknamed it Pedro, after the hero of a Colombian telenovela. Pedro's remains, right, show that while the flipper and feather shapes that make penguins such excellent swimmers evolved early on, the colour patterning of modern penguins is likely to be a far more recent development.

Researchers established Pedro's plumage colours by comparing its melanosomes — the tiny, pigment-carrying structures within cells — with those of living penguins.

In a paper published on September 30 in the online edition of the journal Science, they report that the fossil's melanosomes were much smaller than those of its modern descendants.

‘Paracas is extraordinary'

“Before this fossil, we had no evidence about the feathers, colours and flipper shapes of ancient penguins,” said Julia Clarke of the University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, the lead author of the paper. “We had questions and this was our first chance to start answering them.” Clarke described the Paracas site as an extraordinary place that could still yield “new discoveries that can change our view of not only penguin evolution, but of other marine vertebrates”. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010