Earliest giant penguin

The earliest giant penguin is an as-yet-unnamed giant species whose leg bones were found with fossil remains of Waimanu manneringi in New Zealand and were formally documented in April 2017. Its fossils date back approximately 61 million years to the Palaeocene epoch. Although other fossil penguin species are known from this same time period, they were all much smaller than this new one, which is believed to have attained a total length of around 1.50 m, meaning that it may have been almost the same size as the most famous fossil giant penguin Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi, which existed around 45–33 million years ago in New Zealand and Antarctica and stood 1.7 m tall.

What makes this new species so intriguing is that despite its great age, its fossil remains suggest that it was actually more similar in anatomical structure (and possibly in locomotory behaviour, too) to far more recent penguins than it was to other penguins from its own time period. Consequently, ornithologists believe that the evolutionary origin of penguins may date back much further than previously thought.