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Giant Penguin-Like Birds May Have Once Waddled Around The Northern Hemisphere, Too - ScienceAlert

Giant Penguin-Like Birds May Have Once Waddled Around The Northern Hemisphere, Too - ScienceAlert

Giant Penguin-Like Birds May Have Once Waddled Around The Northern Hemisphere, Too - ScienceAlert
Jul 05, 2020 41 secs

A new fossil discovery has revealed that New Zealand's ancient monster penguins were not the only human-sized, flightless birds waddling around our planet tens of millions of years ago.

The strange thing is, the now-extinct group of birds, known as plotopterids, are not related to penguins at all - but they look remarkably similar, and probably used their flipper-like wings in similar ways.

"Plotopterids looked like penguins, they swam like penguins, they probably ate like penguins – but they weren't penguins.".

In the past few years, we've come to understand a lot more about plotopterids, but this is the first time their anatomy has been compared in detail to ancient penguins.

Even though plotopterids have large webbed feet like penguins, the authors think they probably swam underwater relying mostly on their wings as flippers, judging by their anatomy.

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