A new species of giant penguin from New Zealand

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A new species of giant penguin in the genus Crossvallia has been described from Paleocene age remains from New Zealand. The new species has been given the name C. waiparensis, with the species name originating from the Waipara Greensand site, the area of North Canterbury in New Zealand where the remains of this species were discovered. This species is among the world's oldest known penguins and is also one of the largest, being 1.6 meters in height, .4 meters taller than the largest modern penguin, the emperor penguin, and weighing up to 70 to 80 kilograms. The other species in this genus, C. unienwillia, is known from remains discovered in Cross Valley in Antarctica, suggesting an even closer relationship between New Zealand and Antarctica than previously thought. The leg bones of this species suggest that its feet played a larger role in swimming than those of modern penguins. This species marks the fifth species of penguin known from the Waipara Greensand site, suggesting that this site was a very significant area of penguin diversity during the Paleocene. This new species also provides further support to the hypothesis that penguins reached large size early on in their evolutionary history. Here is a model of the species compared to a human, a diagram depicting known elements about the animal, and a link to the paper describing the new species.




Paper (open access!): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03115518.2019.1641619

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