Penguins these days are cute little birds famous for their giant colonies on and near the inhospitable shores of Antarctica. But fossil evidence reveals that there have been other, larger, and far more vicious versions in the past:
The bird waddled around off the east coast of New Zealand between 55 and 60 million years ago. And it was a giant as far as penguins go. The researchers estimate that it probably weighed about 220 pounds and was around 5 feet 10 inches tall. "That's about as tall as a medium-sized man," says Gerald Mayr, a paleontologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Franfurt, Germany, and the lead author of the new study published today in Nature Communications. "This particular specimen is one of the largest known fossil penguins."
Perhaps somewhere, in a parallel universe, these aquatic birds got the upper hand on the precursors of modern cetaceans. In that familiar and yet alien ocean there are no whales or dolphins, and in their place are enormous birds adapted to life in the sea. Maybe some would sport a tuft of feathers or a vestigial beak giving away their heritage. While on shore, pin-headed mammals would debate the existence of the very evolution that produced them.
In a new collection of papers published Wednesday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, researchers around the world analyzed 27 extreme weather events from 2016 and found that human-caused climate change was a “significant driver” for 21 of them. The effort is part of the growing field of climate change attribution, which explores connections between warming and weather events that have already happened.
Headlines circulating on the internet breathlessly described the discovery of a 512-year-old shark — but they're a little off the mark. … the researchers' analysis of 28 female Greenland sharks did not identify one of them as over 500 years old. Eye tissue analysis presented a probability range suggesting that the sharks were at least 272 years old, and could potentially be as much as 512 years old ...