(light rhythmic music)
- Good afternoon, everyone.
It gives my great pleasure to do the formal introduction
for our guest today, Dr. Daniel Ksepka.
Dr. Ksepka is the curator of the Bruce Museum
in Greenwich, Connecticut.
He completed his BS at Rutgers University
and his PhD at Columbia University.
In addition to his curatorship at the Bruce Museum,
he is a research associate
at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago
and a research collaborator
at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum
of Natural History.
To quote one of his webpages, "Museums are my home."
He is a paleontologist who uses fossil data
to reconstruct the timing of modern bird evolution,
allowing him to understand how events like extinctions,
climate change, and plate tectonic events
influence avian evolution.
He has just published a review of dinosaur nesting ecology
in the American Scientist that I shared
with the faculty list this morning.
I couldn't put it on the student list 'cause it was too big.
If you're interested in it,
just email me and I'll pass it along to you.
Without further ado, we welcome Dr. Kspeka
as he delivers his talk entitled,
"Penguins, Past and Present."
- All right, it's penguin time.
I'm gonna press share.
Are we good on AV?
All right.
Yes? Okay.
Well thanks for coming out today
and thanks for inviting me here.
I am going to talk about the evolution
of my favorite group of birds, the penguins.
And I'm gonna cover a lot of discoveries
that have taken place in New Zealand.
I really wanted to focus on that
because that's where a lot of the news
and study of ancient penguins is happening these days.
Don't seem to-
Oh, there we go.
So, I'll just introduce myself briefly.
I'm a curator at the Bruce Museum.
This is a picture that we're all very proud of
because this is our new wing.
It hasn't actually opened yet.
It will be opening this spring,
but we've been working on it for the last about three years
and planning it for about the last seven years.
And this is going to double our size
and add a lot of new amenities like our new auditorium
and gift shop and restaurant.
So we're super happy.
And when I got hired at the Bruce Museum in 2014,
they said, what will your first exhibit be?
And I said, penguins.
And they said, that sounds great,
but we're gonna save it for the new wing,
which we'll be opening in 2018.
Well, here it's 2023 and we're actually finally going
to get to put that show on.
So I've had a long time to to think about this
and this is how we've been working.
These are some of my new friends.
We've been acquiring penguins from zoos and aquariums
when they die of natural causes
and we've been bringing them back to life as taxidermy.
We've also been collecting fossils.
We've been doing 3D scans so we can make replicas of fossils
in other countries.
We have two penguin mummies, believe it or not,
and videos even of robotic penguins
that can swim underwater autonomously or fly through the air
because they're filled with some type of gas.
So this is my son, Michael.
I spoke here in 2017, and that was quite some time ago.
And he was a little tiny baby
and this was his very first out-of-state road trip.
And so this is a really great memory for me
and it's wonderful to be back,
and I just wanted to say a lot has changed since then.
He's in kindergarten now and he has a three-year-old sister.
And so maybe that's an awkward segue
or a quick way to cram my kids in,
but a lot has changed in the world of penguins too.
So this talk is gonna have a little introduction
that's similar to last time,
but most of it's going to be discoveries that happened
since that first talk.
So I always like to begin with an introduction
to living penguins before working into the fossils.
And I'm interested in how many species of penguins
do you all think there are today?
Anyone want to shout out a guess?
A hundred or 13?
Anyone in between that?
(Daniel chuckles)
Lower, higher?
Who thinks more than 13, who thinks less than 13?
More?
Less?
Wow, you guys are smart.
All right, so there's about 20 living species
of penguins today.
These are beautiful photographs by Tuey Delroy.
She's a nature photographer who's worked with us
for this exhibition.
So a lot of her work will be on the walls
as exhibit graphics.
And these are the 20 living species of penguins
that we have today.
I say about 20 because there's a little bit of debate.
We actually recently sequenced the complete genomes
of all penguins.
And that's another amazing thing to me.
Back when little Michael came up here in 2017,
I would not think we'd have the bandwidth
or the money to sequence complete genomes
of all the penguin species.
But now we have them.
We actually just published them last year.
And there's a little bit of debate.
For example, the Royal Penguin is the one shown
with the white chin.
The Macaroni is the penguin in the lower left-hand corner.
They look very different,
but if you look at their DNA,
it's clear that they're exchanging DNA,
there's interbreeding going on.
And so a lot of the scientists don't consider these
to be two separate species,
but rather just populations with that variance in plumage.
On the other side of the same coin,
these cute little guys,
these are the tiniest penguins alive today,
they're about a foot tall and weigh two pounds.
The Australian Little Penguin
and the New Zealand Little Penguin.
They look identical.
You can't tell them apart from them walking around.
You can't tell them apart from their skeleton.
But when you look at their genes,
they've been separated for about a million years,
and they're obviously separated by a very wide distance.
And so they're probably a very good species
split genetically, but a very difficult one
to make in the field if you just saw them walking by,
you'd have no idea which one you were seeing.
So these penguins are distributed
throughout the entire southern hemisphere.
We tend to imagine penguins in icy Antarctic environments,
but they actually live pretty much anywhere
they can come ashore without worrying about predators.
They live on these rocky Antarctic islands,
they live in coastal forests,
and some cases, they even breed in desert.
So the penguin in the lower right
is actually shielding its eggs from the sun
rather than worrying about keeping them warm.
And they come in all different shapes and sizes.
This is the largest living penguin, an Emperor Penguin,
stands about as tall as my three year old.
It's about three feet even
and that's the biggest one we have today.
And the smallest penguin is the Little Blue Penguin.
And this is the only video with sound
so I'm gonna hope this works.
But this is Cookie, the Little Penguin being tickled.
(penguin squealing)
Well, you can still enjoy it.
(penguin continues squealing)
It is laughing I assure you.
(Daniel chuckles) (penguin continues squealing)
So that was only one species of penguin
when I give this talk last.
Now we tend to split them
into the Australian and New Zealand species.
And again, about a foot tall, about two pounds.
So I broke this talk into five or six little segments
and the first one is called "Why Study Penguins."
So why might you study penguins?
Maybe they're really cute, they're really funny.
You want to go to all these exotic places.
They're kind of human-like in the way they walk.
They're amusing, they're popular.
But for me, the reason I took up penguins
as the topic of my graduate dissertation
was they represent a really great example
of an evolutionary transition.
So the closest living relatives of penguins
are petrols and albatrosses.
And to get from that point to a penguin
takes about 65 million years
and there's just so much going on.
So they're returning to the water to the greatest extent
than any group of birds ever has done.
It's as interesting as when hoofed mammals becoming whales
or dinosaurs becoming birds.
You've got the loss of flight,
you've got these ridiculous legs, this waddling gait,
the feathers are completely reorganized,
the way they reproduce is very unique in the bird world.
And so figuring out how that happened
gives you a great chance to combine observations
from living penguins and from the fossil record.
This is a wing of a petrol on top and penguin below
and you can see how radically different they are.
The bones look like they've kind of been run over
by a steamroller.
They're very widened, they're very flattened.
That makes them very stiff and very good
at being a flipper basically.
And so they can't fold their wings,
their wings are very short compared to their body,
but that's perfect when you're propelling yourself
through this very dense medium of the water
rather than through the air.
If you look inside the bones, they're incredibly dense.
On the left here is a pelican femur or thighbone.
On the right we have a penguin,
as you can see how thick that cortex is.
There's almost no marrow cavity at all left.
That helps 'em achieve negative buoyancy
and sink into the water column more efficiently.
The feathers are almost comically small.
So here's a cormorant feather on the left
and penguin feather on the right
from the same part of the body.
They've shrunk to just a centimeter or two in length.
They're flattened, they're scale-like,
very, very good at keeping them warm.
They have hundreds of feathers per square inch,
but not good at all for flying.
But that doesn't matter since they don't fly anymore.
And so, like I said,
we actually sequenced the whole genomes
of all the penguins last year.
We published this in I think Nature Communications in 2022.
And you see changes in the genome of penguins
in almost every functional category.
So in taste and diet,
in the way their myoglobin stores oxygen,
in their vision and thermal regulation,
even in immunity to parasites and diseases.
So we have a lot of interesting things that we detected
from the genomic data that we might not actually be able
to pick up on by just looking at the penguin.
We see that they've lost the genes
that help them make functional green cone cells
in their eyes.
And that means they're shifting their vision
towards the blue end of the spectrum.
So they're more efficient at seeing
in the blue part of the visible light wavelength
and the red part.
And that makes sense because the deeper you go on the water,
the less red light tends to penetrate.
And so once you get down, be like 50 feet or so,
all that's filtering out.
But the blue light can penetrate much further
in the water column
and that helps the penguins to detect their prey,
watch out for predators, things like that.
My favorite thing we found out from the genomes though
was they've lost a lot of senses of taste.
So this is a Deli Penguin sticking its tongue out,
and you can see their tongues here kind of frightening.
They look almost alien.
And what you're seeing there is this series
of keratinous spikes.
They basically are little backwards projections
that help them hold prey in.
There's counterpart projections
on the roof of the mouth as well,
and so these animals can really hold onto something
once they grab them.
So the tongues aren't soft like ours,
they're kind of creepy, and they've lost many...
They lost the ability to detect many types of taste.
So here's a little penguin.
When we look at the genome, you can see in green,
that's species that have the complete gene.
In yellow are those that have a pseudo gene.
And in gray are those of the genes not found at all.
And so penguins have basically shut down a lot of taste.
They don't have the ability to taste sweet at all.
That's actually not that unique.
Almost no birds can actually detect sweet.
A few exceptions include things like hummingbirds
that actually feed on nectar.
They can't detect umami, that's kind of the savory taste,
so they wouldn't taste that delicious steak.
And they can't taste bitter.
I used Brussels sprouts as an example,
I couldn't really think of anything else.
So they're only able to detect sour and salty taste.
And this is something that's cool
'cause you might not be able to test this very well
with living penguins.
You can't really say, did you like those gummy bears?
Yes or no?
How are those chips?
But you can see that these genes don't function,
so they should not be able to detect those.
And this is probably related to being aquatic.
They're feeding underwater.
Yes?
Oh.
Oh now we gotta watch your gummy bears disappear again.
Sorry. (Daniel chuckles)
So when you're aquatic and you're eating underwater,
you're probably just swallowing your food whole.
So these tastes are not as important.
You don't need to know if a fruit is ripe
or if some carrion you're eating is too spoiled or not.
And your taste sense of smell
is also getting a little bit overwhelmed
by the cold, salty water.
So it kind of makes sense.
Part two of the talk,
I'm gonna move on to the fossil record of penguins,
and that's my main focus.
I'm a paleontologist,
so I was a co-author on the genome paper,
but I was mostly providing some advice
about how to interpret these in the sense of deep time.
If you let me in the lab with a pipette,
I'd probably stab myself in the eye
and contaminate all the data.
But this is where where I do feel comfortable.
The fossil record of penguins is excellent.
There are 60 species of fossil penguins known,
actually more than 60, 'cause we just named two last week.
That's more than three times the amount
that are alive today.
So they're very diverse.
There are thousands of individual fossils
ranging from single bones to complete skeletons.
And the reason we have such a great fossil record
is they have those dense bones we just talked about
and they're living in marine environments.
So a penguin dies, it can sink to the bottom
and cover with sand or silt and be preserved as a fossil.
If a little bird dies in the woods,
it's probably just gonna get scavenged or wash away
or something like that and not make it into the record.
So the story of penguins begins about 60 million years ago,
and it begins in New Zealand.
And it begins in New Zealand in two different ways,
one geologically and one historically.
Historically we have a nice little tie into Darwin week.
So in 1859, about 160 years ago,
the first fossil penguin ever described
was written up by none other than Thomas Henry Huxley,
also known as Darwin's bulldog
for his defense of the theory of evolution
back when it was still in its infancy.
He was a very good anatomist,
he did a lot of work on dinosaurs and birds,
and he described this bone, not super exciting,
but this is an ankle bone from a penguin.
And when Huxley saw this,
he instantly knew it belonged to a penguin
because it's so unique.
These birds have such short little feet,
this looks nothing like the same bone in any other bird
that's alive today.
And so Huxley said, this is a penguin,
it must mean two things.
One, penguins once got bigger
'cause this bird's a little bit bigger
than an Emperor Penguin,
and two, penguins are much older than we thought
because this bone's about 25 million years in age.
So it was a very important first step
towards understanding penguins.
Since that time, hundreds of fossil discoveries
have been made in New Zealand,
including the oldest known penguin.
This is Waimanu.
It is a beautiful bird.
It comes from the south island of New Zealand,
and it's about 61 and a half million years in age.
So it's a very primitive penguin, the most primitive known.
It has a more slender foot than modern species,
it can fold its wings, it had a longer more spear-like beak.
And so it would've been flightless for sure,
but quite primitive compared to any living penguin.
And to put the age in context, here we are,
Waimanu is about 61 and a half million.
The asteroid impact that wipes out the dinosaurs is 66.
And the oldest fossils that are closer to humans
than to chimps are about seven or eight million years.
So we can say penguins are almost 10 times older
than human beings.
That's really pretty cool how long they've been around
and how soon they evolved after that great extinction
at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
So now I'll talk a little bit about some of the discoveries
that we've made.
I've been to New Zealand four times to collect penguins
and to study penguins at museums.
And that's me on the right
with my good friend Daniel Thomas on the left.
He's a professor at Massey University over there.
And we're standing by a big square hole,
and that's where we've cut a fossil out with a chainsaw.
And so the interesting thing about many of the fossil sites
in New Zealand is sometimes you're collecting in cliffs.
You tend to think of fossils
as you're digging a pit in the ground or something.
Here we're walking along these cliff sides,
this very soft rock,
and sometimes we see something like this.
That red cross section you're seeing
is actually a flipper bone from a large penguin,
and it's sticking out of that rock
where the river's eroded through it,
and it's starting to kind of turn red.
It's almost rusting in place.
And so when we see something like this,
we hope there's more behind it and we end up collecting it.
So it's like not very Indiana Jones-like uniform
because we're basically using little pneumatic tools
to chip away at the rock here.
And you can see we're excavating around
where that bone was sticking out.
This turned out to be a pretty good fossil
of a penguin called Kairuku
that we were able to eventually take back
to the lab at Otago University.
Here's a flipper of that species.
This is a Gigantic Penguin.
It lived back in the Oligocene Period
about 27 million years ago.
For scale, the the smaller white bones
are those of a Yellow Eye Penguin,
the species that lives in the same area today.
And this is my colleague and mentor, Ewen Fordyce,
he'll come up again later in the story,
but here he's putting together a nearly complete skeleton
of Kairuku.
And again on the left, a little artist reconstruction
of that bird with a modern Yellow Eye Penguin for scale.
So this was a very important find.
Ewen collected these fossils quite some time ago
and invited me to study them in 2012.
We've collected more together since,
and for a long time we didn't know
how big these fossil penguins were
'cause someone would find one foot bone and they say, oh,
it's twice as big as an Emperor Penguin,
and Wikipedia says an Emperor Penguin's
four and a half feet tall,
even though it's really closer to three,
so this must have been like an eight foot tall penguin.
And they would've all these ridiculous
Frankenstein-looking birds
because they were relying on the proportions
in living species.
But it turns out Kairuku's quite different
than anything around today.
So this is a little model of the skeleton
that Daniel Thomas put together.
We basically surface scanned all of the bones
and digitally put them back how they would've been in life.
And we figured out this animal stood about four foot three
and it had a very different kind of profile
than a modern penguin.
It's much thinner.
It's like almost like
if you took a bowling pin shaped regular penguin
and stretched it out a little bit.
The sternum or breast bones are much longer,
the legs are very strongly built,
the flipper is much more elongated,
and the neck and the beak are as well.
So it would've been a more graceful animal.
This is a wonderful reconstruction of it by Chris Gaskin,
which hangs in the Geology Museum at the University.
So they would be very beautiful birds, I think.
We were very proud to be able to put this back together
and get, I think, the first reasonable idea
of the proportions of this penguin.
So it was huge.
Four foot two is pretty big.
But then we came upon something even bigger
and I'll talk about that one second.
I just wanted to put this coin, and this is kind of fun.
A few years after we found that,
they actually made it into a real coin in New Zealand.
So this is $5 silver coin with Kairuku on it.
The name Kairuku basically means
"diver who returns with food."
And that's based on the Maori language,
the first people to set up shop in New Zealand
about 1300 AD or so.
So in 2017, about the time I was standing here actually
for my first talk,
my friend Alan Tendenson, he's a curator at Te Papa,
the National Museum of New Zealand, found this on the beach.
So he was out looking at these concretions,
these rocks that sometimes have bones in them,
and they're just eroding out at the beach.
And so they may be naturally broken by wave action.
And if you can get to them in time,
you might discover something.
If you leave them there,
eventually they'll just be destroyed by the ocean.
And this was a real interesting find
because bird bones are pretty rare.
And he said, well my goodness,
this is a bird but the bones are so thick,
it has to be a penguin.
And it's also a little bit ridiculously large.
And so this is what he found.
That's the humerus of this bird
next to an Emperor Penguin humerus.
It's called Kumimanu fordycei.
I'll talk a little bit about the name in a couple slides,
but in case this is unclear 'cause of the rock around it,
here is a 3D print of that humerus
next to an Emperor Penguin.
So absolutely massive.
In fact, it's actually the same length as my humerus.
So my upper arm bone is the same length as this penguin's.
So it would've been, I mean imagine flippers like this.
It's fantastically gigantic.
And here's a picture of cutout we made of it for our museum,
for our penguin exhibition.
So there's an Emperor and a Deli
and a Little Penguin next to it.
Another way you can envision it is size.
So what we did is we wanted to figure out
how big this penguin is.
We didn't have the whole skeleton like we did for Kairuku.
And so we could get a pretty ballpark estimate of height
but a much better estimate of body mass
because the humerus scales very well to body mass.
It needs to propel the penguin through the water.
So much like the femur or leg bone supports us on land,
that bone supports penguins when they're swimming.
And so there's a pretty tight regression.
We ended up measuring a couple hundred penguin bones
from modern species and we estimated the mass at 340 pounds,
which is pretty good, pretty good for a penguin.
The New York Times actually put out an article,
and they said it's the size of Lane Johnson,
the poor Eagles, bad call at the end of the game,
but that's about the weight of this penguin.
So it would've been huge.
It wouldn't have been as tall,
so it would've been better at the line of scrimmage
'cause it's gonna be lower down, about five foot three.
If you don't care about football very much,
I think another good point of comparison
would be about an average size gorilla.
So pretty, pretty huge animal.
And there's a, this is Kairuku.
We didn't do a Kumimanu 'cause it wasn't discovered
when we started the exhibit, but that's me with Kairuku.
So you can kind of see,
you can imagine how that penguin could put on the pounds.
They're much more dense than humans.
So that was Kumimanu fordycei.
We published that on Wednesday last week.
So it's cool 'cause I can actually talk about it.
I wasn't sure I'd be able to mention it
until the paper came out.
But we also had a second penguin in the same paper.
This is another nodule,
another concretion that Alan found on the beach.
And this one had a humerus in it.
And this ended up being a second smaller species
of closely related penguin that we called...
There we go.
This one we named Petradyptes stonehousei.
Petradyptes basically means "rock diver"
'cause it was found in a rock and it's a diving bird.
And stonehousei is after Bernard Stonehouse
and I'll talk about him in just one second.
But we actually ended up
with five different partial skeletons of this bird.
And so it's a little bit bigger than an Emperor Penguin.
So not as large as Kumimanu, but still pretty impressive.
And we know a lot more about the overall body proportions
because we actually do have the shoulder blade, the flipper,
the legs, the pelvis, the breast bone,
a lot more pieces of this penguin.
This is what they may have looked like in life.
The Kumimanu is a little bit more conjectural
because we don't have as much of the skeleton,
we just know it's gigantic.
Petradyptes, we're on a little bit firmer ground
on the proportions of the leg and wing.
And again we always use the Emperor Penguin for scale.
We think they stood probably a little bit less upright
than the Emperor,
so you can see 'em slouching forward a bit,
and they almost certainly had much longer beaks
based on what other penguins from that time looked like.
So this is Ewen, and this is one of my,
oh I'm gonna move that green thing down for you again,
pull that down.
Ewen Fordyce is recently retired professor
at the University of Otago,
and he was a really important mentor for me personally,
for Daniel Thomas who's my co-author on this,
and for Simone Giovanardi, he's Daniel's graduate student.
So it's kind of like having your kid and grandkid honor you
when we all got together for this paper.
Ewen is a wonderful scientist.
He's published huge amounts of papers,
he's collected amazing fossils,
but he's also a really strong advocate
for scientific outreach.
So he's built museum collections for exhibits,
he has conducted this lost world trail
where people can drive around and actually see fossils
in the ground in New Zealand
and teach people how important they are,
what we can learn from them.
And he's been someone who's always taken the time
to help younger scientists get their footing
and give them opportunities.
So there's no one better we can name a penguin after.
Here he is holding a baby Magellanic Penguin,
which he called the beautiful beshadded creature.
(Daniel chuckles)
And he's the master storyteller.
He once told a story of his graduate student
losing to a duck in tic-tac-toe.
And when he tells the story it takes like 10 minutes.
He says he walks in, it's the LA County Fair,
they've never been to America before, and his student goes,
"What's this?"
You put a quarter in and a duck walks up
and it taps little thing and an X lights up.
And he says, "Oh I can beat this duck."
And he puts his O in the square,
the duck looks around a little bit, taps it beak,
the O lights up again.
He said, "Then Craig started sweating,
there's perspiration on his brow, Daniel."
He blocked the duck
but the duck had two different opportunities to win.
The duck wins, a little piece of food falls out,
the duck walks back to the corner, lights goes off,
then they say, Craig you gotta give another chance.
Like, oh it was rigged, the computer's telling the duck
what to do.
He plays the second time.
The duck walks right up, X O X O.
The duck beats him in only three moves.
(Daniel laughs)
Everyone's laughing an uproar,
he's getting mad because back then a quarter was a dollar
and in New Zealand that was $2.
They finally get him to play again
and the next time he said he puts the quarter in
and the duck doesn't even walk up to the point.
It just walks up to its food bowl
because it knows it's gonna win.
And I love this story, I tell this to my kids.
When Ewen tells this, it takes like 20 minutes
and you finish a pint of beer and
it is, you are laughing so you need to get your inhaler out.
It is amazing how he's a storyteller.
So for all those reasons we were thrilled
to name the species after him.
It's one of the few wonderful acts that taxonomists can do
that no one else can do.
The other penguin is named after Vernon Stonehouse.
This is me with him when I was a postdoc
and this is in 2013.
He is quite a legendary guy.
And again, someone who, despite being kind of famous
and well-known and popular,
always will take time to come up to a student,
look at their poster, talk to them,
and give them some advice and all of that.
I met him this year.
He actually died in 2014
so I only knew him for a couple months,
and we had corresponded about some ideas
about a penguin paper
and unfortunately I didn't know how little time he had left.
He was in very good health when I met him,
but I guess you never know how much time you have.
So we were happy to name Petradyptes after him.
This is a picture of him when he was younger,
and his claim to fame is in 1948,
he was an ex Royal Air Force pilot.
He went to Antarctica, they were on an expedition,
11 people, and they got trapped.
And so they were supposed to get picked up by a boat
and there was too much pack ice and they're like,
well we're just gonna have to leave you here for the winter.
So they were just stuck there in Antarctica,
negative 40 degrees, living in tents.
I mean look, if it's like below 10 degrees,
I can't go out to my car.
I just stay home from work.
He lived there the whole winter
and instead of just hanging on for a dear life, he's like,
I'll just observe the life cycle of the Emperor Penguins.
And we take this for granted.
It's like in Happy Feet, in March of the Emperors,
it's in commercials.
But at that time,
no human being had ever watched the whole cycle
where they lay the egg and the male takes the egg
while the female goes out to feed.
She comes back weeks later,
the male gives the chick to the female,
he goes to feed, et cetera.
No one had ever seen that whole cycle.
So he's the first person to do it.
What an amazing way to make lemonade out of lemons
when you're trapped in Antarctica.
And he did many, many other projects since then.
But that's the namesake for Petradyptes,
which is an Emperor-sized penguin, so a good one.
So I'm moving on to the fourth of the five pieces.
This is called the Escape from New Zealand.
This is how penguin's first left New Zealand
because all of the oldest penguins,
all of the most primitive penguins are found in New Zealand.
So we have a pretty high degree of confidence
that's where they originated,
that's where they first evolved.
And Daniel and I were interested
in what let them cross the oceans to a new continent
for the first time.
And we got this idea while we were chopping up penguins
'cause when we were students,
we would dissect every penguin we could get our hands on.
I was often in the basement
of the American Museum of Natural History late at night
and one time a security guard shown a flashlight
and I was in this creepy room with the scalpel
and I looked up covered in penguin blood
and the guy just said eh, and he kept on going.
But this is what I was doing,
we're dissecting the wing here,
and that line is pointing to the arterial plexus.
This is a band of arteries wrapped in veins
and it's a countercurrent heat exchanger.
It's a pretty common concept.
You've got the hot blood leaving the body core
out to the flipper,
but that flipper is a terrible thing for shedding heat.
It's very high surface area, it's a volume,
and so it's like an elephant's ear.
It will waste all your body heat if you let it.
So the blood coming through the veins back to the body core
cools that blood down before it gets out,
and likewise, that cool blood returning to the heart
is heated up by the blood near the armpit.
This is so efficient
that people have measured the temperature
at a penguin's wingtip and it's internally close
to the heart in the muscle tissue,
it can be a hundred degrees Fahrenheit different.
So it's a very, very efficient system.
So we wanted to figure out,
could you track this into the fossil record,
because again, we're paleontologists,
and so there's a system called osteological correlates.
There's three types of them
and they let you make a prediction of soft tissue
from skeletal features.
The first type is a negative one-way correlate.
This means that skeletal feature is always present
if the soft tissue feature is present,
but the soft tissue feature can be absent
even if you have the skeletal feature.
Here's an example, pouches.
Animals that have pouches always have these epipubic bones.
You can see the line pointing there,
and that helps support the pouch.
So any pouch marsupial today will have that bone,
but you can have that bone and still not have a pouch.
The example, the only one I could find was the numbat.
This is a great animal.
The numbat, type of marsupial completely pouchless,
but it still retains those bones.
So if you were to find a skeleton without that bone,
you could say no pouch.
But if you found it with the bone,
you couldn't say on the flip side it definitely had a pouch.
It may or may not have.
Better yet for fossils as positive one-way correlates,
this is when the soft tissue feature is always present
if the skeletal feature is present.
It could still be present without it,
but this is good enough for us when we're paleontologists.
And a good example is quill knobs.
These are little bumps on the bones.
And you see the bottom is a vulture wing that's dissected.
And above that you can see the ulna bone, the shoulder bone,
or sorry, the elbow bone with those knobs
where the feathers attach by ligaments.
Above that is a velociraptor bone.
It has full knobs and so this shows
that this animal had feathers on its arm.
So if you find those bumps in any bird or any dinosaur,
you know it had feathers.
However, just because they're absent
doesn't mean no feathers are present.
We actually have dinosaurs with feathers
that don't have these knobs.
And the best of all is a two-way correlate,
a positive two-way correlate.
This means skeletal feature's present,
soft tissue's present, vice versa, perfect.
And that's what we found here for the plexus.
So the plexus is the soft tissue vascular feature.
The sulcus is a set of grooves
that basically it's the bones being pressed,
sorry, the blood vessels being pressed into the bones.
Every bird that has this plexus has the grooves
or the sulcus.
Every bird that doesn't have a plexus
does not have a sulcus,
at least of the ones we've dissected.
So we said, all right, we're good to go.
We can map this out in the fossil record.
These are 3D scans of some of the fossil penguin bones.
Petradyptes is the third from the left.
All of these ancient penguins for the Paleocene Epoch,
that's the first 10 million years or so
of the age of mammals,
none of them have a plexus.
Modern penguins have the plexus and they have the sulcus,
and so what we're seeing is the first penguins
to get out of New Zealand have that feature.
And so Daniel and I hypothesized
this may have been an important feature
that let penguins spend a longer time in the water,
travel greater distances, and escape from New Zealand.
And we did a little bit of statistical analysis.
We used a likelihood model to predict
that loons, albatrosses,
and early New Zealand penguins lack the structure
and that it was present in all other penguins
or in some cases the humerus wasn't preserved,
so we don't know except for one weird equatorial penguin
that lived in the Eocene.
So we're not sure if that animal didn't need
this feature anymore or maybe it just didn't preserve well
because the animal wasn't fully grown
or something like that.
Still a little bit of a mystery.
But what we see is basically these old penguins
like Waimanu, Kumimanu, and Petradyptes don't have it yet.
The first penguins that get elsewhere
have a very clear sulcus,
indicating they had this countercurrent system,
so they may have been able to travel
across to other continents,
and they get there quick.
Couple million years after Kumimanu lived
we have animals in Antarctica, New Zealand,
Australia, South America,
basically everywhere in the world penguins live today.
And what's cool is this feature is very important
for penguins that live in Antarctica,
but it's more of an exaptation.
It's something that originally had nothing to do
with icy conditions on land.
It was important for foraging in the water.
But now is very, very useful for animals
that are
breeding in negative 40 degree temperatures up there.
I guess I should say down there.
So finally the last part of the talk,
I'm gonna talk about the craziest penguin
is the Crested Penguins.
This is the Northern Rockhopper,
which is the champion for flamboyance.
It puts all the other ones to shame.
And this is one of a group of seven living species
that have these yellow plumes.
They have a pigment called spheniscin
that's only found in penguins.
It's a unique pigment.
It's different than the yellow in birds
like canaries or gold finches.
And it's important for breeding.
It's for species recognition and for impressing mates.
There's actually been experiments,
I wish I can do these experiments.
They capture them, they cut their yellow feathers shorter,
and then they let 'em go,
and they lose 50% chance of finding a mate.
So it's very important for these penguins to have this
to attract other penguins.
So Daniel and I and some other colleagues
actually have recently described a fossil-crested penguin
that's about 2 million years old,
which we called Udyptes entatu.
Entatu is basically dawn in the Maori language
because it's the first of this lineage.
And it looks exactly like a modern crested penguin
in terms of the flipper, the leg, the vertebrae.
But the big difference is
it has a much more slender mandible.
So these crested penguins today have very deep bills
and they have giant tongues.
They have those spiky tongues I showed you before,
and that helps them catch krill.
That's the feature we also see in stiff-tailed penguins,
things like Deli Penguins and Chin-strap Penguins.
So this very, very deep bill helps them capture
more tiny planktonic shelling organisms.
But the fossil doesn't have that yet.
These are all laser scans of different penguin's beaks.
And we see this animal is clearly part
of the crested penguin lineage
but hasn't evolved that deep bill yet.
And so it probably means it's not yet focusing
as much on krill.
And one of the things I thought was fascinating
is the changes we see in the penguin skeleton.
There's a lot of big changes in the flipper
and the leg early on.
The skull is kind of static, it's very long build,
slender build for tens of millions of years,
and you only get all these different forms
pretty recently in time in the last 15 million years.
And the deep bills are only coming up
in the last two million years
when we're starting to get glacial,
interglacial ice age cycles.
And so this helps create these massive populations of krill
under the Antarctic ice sheets.
You can get trillions of tons of these things.
They're important for whales.
Whales responded by getting much bigger.
The largest whales alive today only evolved a million
or two million years ago
and penguins did not manage to get
to be a hundred feet long,
but they did evolve these new types of beaks
that helped them take advantage of this food source.
So we think that probably happened sometime
between five and two million years ago,
and it correlates really well to the beginning
of these ice age, interglacial cycles.
And I thought one really cool tie in with our genomic data
is that penguins, they have only one functional copy
of the chia genes that help them,
the chitinace gene that help them to digest that chitin,
that protein that's in bug shells and shrimp
and crustaceans in their shell.
You need that if you're eating those animals.
A lot of birds have completely lost them.
So if you're eating fruit or leaves
or you're a vulture that's scavenging
or you're a hummingbird drinking nectar,
you don't need that gene to digest your food.
So it tends to get lost.
In birds that eat shrimp or birds that eat a lot of bugs,
they tend to retain multiple functional copies.
And I thought it was weird that penguins lost that
because so many living penguins love krill.
It's like their thing.
They eat 98% krill diets.
But I think this ties into the fossil record,
again, this only evolved two million years ago,
so for a very long time,
they're probably eating mostly fish, maybe some squid,
and not dealing with these small crustaceans.
And so they probably lost one by one,
their ancestral number of chia genes
and ended up luckily retaining one,
because otherwise they may never have been able
to start eating that stuff like they do today.
So the very last part of the talk
is the youngest fossil penguin.
It also comes from New Zealand.
So I tried to keep it in New Zealand the whole time
and this is a species we described in 2019
from the Chatham Islands,
which are about 500 kilometers
to the east of mainland New Zealand.
Beautiful, rugged place.
It was colonized by humans around 700 or 800 years ago.
And these were the people known as the Moriori.
They have a very unique culture.
They have these dendroglyphs, these carvings in trees.
They're genetically related to the people
on mainland New Zealand, the Maori.
There's actually a pretty sad history of these islands,
which I won't really get into here.
But one thing we find in some of the campsites
from the original sediments
when we're talking 700 years ago or so are penguin bones.
And Alan, my colleague who found the giant penguin,
he also found penguin bones in midans,
or ancient cooking sites where people were butchering birds
and mammals and whatnot and cooking them up,
and they look like this.
This is one of the beautiful skulls.
The problem is it's really hard
to tell crested penguins apart from their skeletons.
If you took all seven species and dumped the bones out
into a pile, it'd be very hard to sort them together.
The main differences are in those head plumes.
So these sat around as a mystery penguin for 15 or 20 years.
And then Tess Cole, she was a PhD student at the time,
she's now earned her doctorate,
but she was studying mitochondrial DNA,
and she was able to extract mitochondrial DNA
from these bones, which was just amazing.
And we figured out that this was a new species
of crested penguin, which we named Eudyptes warhami.
It's the the red one there.
This is a little time plot showing
that it probably split from the Erich crested penguin
and other species that lives in New Zealand
about two million years ago.
So this was a great species
just already sitting in the museum,
but we needed the genetic data to really prove what it was,
whether it was distinct, and what it was related to.
And it's the only species of penguin
that was wiped out by humans.
So penguins are lucky in a way.
Usually when humans get in contact with flightless birds,
it doesn't end well for the birds.
We have examples like the dodo, the solitaire,
elephant birds, moa,
all these wonderful species that were wiped out
in the last thousand years or so
as people spread throughout the globe.
But penguins have mostly been spared
probably because they only spend a little bit of time
on land in many cases.
So they're out at sea,
maybe you don't have enough time to get 'em all
while they're on land.
But this is a cautionary tale that penguins can go extinct,
and there are many that are in danger today
from things like climate change, over fishing,
habitat modification, oil spills are the most dramatic thing
but they're one-off events,
whereas other other things are cumulative.
So there are many species that are either threatened
or endangered today.
And I think Eudyptes warhami is a little bit of a emblem
for remembering how important they are
and how we should take care of them.
I wanna end with an instinction,
so I'll put the little blue penguins back on,
and with that I'd be happy to take some questions.
Now this is ridiculous.
I just realized if I moved the cursor
out of the side of the screen the thing goes away,
but perfect, on the left side.
Do I have someone back there?
- [Audience Member 1] Can you repeat the question?
- Sure.
(audience member asking question)
Yes, the question is
whether there's countercurrent heat exchangers
in other parts of the body besides the flipper,
and there are.
There's at least one in the leg,
there's one in the eye believe it or not.
And I believe there may be a few others.
None of those leave any trace on the skeleton,
so we weren't able to do anything in the fossil record.
But many birds have them,
A lot of wading birds that stand in cold water,
even ducks I think will have them,
and it helps them where you're standing in icy water
with your feet looking for something,
like if a heron or what,
it helps them conserve their core body temperature.
(audience member speaking)
Okay.
- [Audience Member 2] As mentioned,
penguins often are wonderful case study in evolution.
What are one or two general principles or interesting facts
about evolution which share based on your study of penguins?
- Oh sorry, can you repeat that?
- [Audience Member 2] General principles of evolution
you've learned from penguins.
- From penguins.
I think one of the general lessons penguins have for us
is sometimes you can lose something
that you thought was good but was holding you back.
So I think losing flight was the best thing
that ever happened to penguins.
When they first evolved they were probably very similar
to things like puffins and auks, and diving petrols,
birds that can fly through the air
and also propel themselves underwater with their flippers.
If you wanna do that,
you can't get much bigger than two pounds
because you're basically having a trade-off
between needing more muscle to dive more efficiently
but then getting too heavy to fly through the air.
Once penguins lose flight they can get as big as they want.
You can see they do so very quickly.
That giant penguin I showed you,
the gorilla penguin is only about 9 million years
after the Cretaceous mass extinction.
So pretty quickly they achieve giant size
and that's good for diving, you can go deeper,
you can store more oxygen in your blood and muscles,
and so you can actually stay underwater longer,
and you're much more efficient
because your volume scales faster than your surface area
so you can conserve body temperature
much better underwater too.
So, yeah I think that's a big breakthrough for penguins
to give up flight.
(audience member asking question)
That's a great question.
So in case people didn't hear,
why don't penguins get past the equator, basically?
They do, but it's like a technicality.
So the Galapagos penguin is literally half a mile
over the equator, just barely.
The reasons are probably related to ocean currents.
You have this great upwelling currents around Peru
and on the coast of South Africa,
the circum Antarctic current around Antarctica.
And so these provide a lot of nutrients
which attract plankton,
which attracts small fish and bigger fish, et cetera.
So they're really rich for feeding.
You kind of get near the equator,
and it's like the doldrums and there's not much going on.
And so I don't think it's a thermal barrier
'cause there are penguins in Peru
and there's penguins in Africa
and there's penguins in the Galapagos,
but it's more probably just lack of food source.
There are penguin-like birds in the north,
there's the great auk,
which unfortunately we wiped out 150 years ago.
There was another group called the plot of terrids
that lived in Washington and Oregon State and in Japan,
and they were very penguin-like,
they got emperor size, completely flightless,
but they died out without us having anything to do with it.
So there's no reason to say they can't,
they just can't get past that food dead zone, I think.
- [Audience Member 3] There are a couple of questions.
Are there any examples of cohabitation and symbiosis
with penguins and other animals?
And then another one is,
why does the size of the humerus scale so precisely
with body size?
- Well the first question is,
is there any example of symbiosis with penguins,
and I can't immediately think of any,
unless you consider that they've trained us to feed them
and build water slides for them and stuff like that.
So I don't think, they don't feed cooperatively
with other species as far as I know.
The second question was why does a humerus scale so well
with body size?
My friend Daniel Fields,
he was the one who did the regression,
so he's looked at 20 or 30 different measurements,
the shoulder bones, the wings, the legs
in different bird groups and tried to figure out
which ones had the tightest correlation to body mass.
Femur is generally very good.
Humerus turned out to be quite good for penguins.
And I think that's because the two that we use
that had a very high R value were right here,
the width at the shoulder joint and then the overall length.
And I think that's because basically you're transferring
all of your thrust from the wing to the body at this joint
and so it has to have some kind of safety valve.
You can't really skimp there
or you risk basically dislocating your flipper.
So I think because they're wing propelled,
it's even more important than the way they walk on land.
I've actually seen a one-legged penguin in Africa
just doing completely fine.
It would go out and swim, come back, go to its nest,
hopping around on one leg, as long as its flippers work.
So I think because it's so essential to locomotion,
it scales well.
That being said, the femur is fine too.
The leg bone, the thigh bone is good, strong regression.
We just didn't have that bone for that particular penguin,
so we couldn't use it.
Sir?
So the question is why are there no giant penguins today?
And I think that's...
it's a question that troubles me.
So why are there no giant penguins?
I don't think anyone's fully resolved that.
The leading hypothesis is probably that we have competition
from seals and sea lion from Pinniped.
So around the time giant penguins go extinct,
which is roughly 15 million years ago,
we see seals and sea lions and their relatives
spreading throughout the southern hemisphere.
And the big penguins, they're overlapping with small seals,
and so it may be competition for food,
it may also be competition in terms of breeding space.
So you're imagining two penguins,
and they've got their egg, and they're so happy.
And then two elephant seals start fighting on the beach
and crush the egg.
They really monopolize what we call haul out territories,
where animals who are ocean going
and come and lay their eggs,
and so that could be part of it.
That's something Ken Warhide,
a paleontologist who works in Seattle,
has suggested quite a while ago.
It could also be predation to a certain extent,
but I think the nesting thing actually makes more sense
to me than food or predation.
So we don't really know, that's the best guess right now.
It's too bad though, it's kind of sad.
(audience member asking question)
Yes.
Oh.
Oh, great.
(audience member continues asking question)
Yeah, so I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was two.
So I wanted to drive trains when I was one.
Then I got into dinosaurs and I never changed again.
(Daniel chuckles)
So I was in graduate school when I was,
I started when I was 22, so not that different than 20.
And I wanted to work on dinosaurs
and then I realized every group was being so heavily worked
on by other people,
but in the museum there was a drawer
that this paleontologist George Simpson had collected
in 1930s and forties,
and there were 200 fossils
and nobody was looking at them at all.
So I can just work on these.
And they're great because one, it's that transition,
it's from flying to flightless aquatic,
so it's a great, there's a lot going on there
that you can study.
And two was these fossils were described
by the greatest paleontologists of all time
in some people's eyes.
I don't want to try to redo his work,
but he didn't have access to any of these technologies.
So we had a skull 1938, you can just write about it.
Now you can CT scan it.
So we scanned it and I looked at the brain morphology
in the thesis,
then we looked at taking microscope sections from the bones
and looking at growth patterns,
which weren't known back then.
Getting DNA from fossils,
that was completely unimaginable at that time.
And so there is 12 different techniques
that could be applied to this big pile of fossils.
So it was like opportunity and then, oh my god,
they're so cool, look what they're doing.
I'm gonna go to the zoo now,
watch 'em flying through the water.
And I think just a good question and a good opportunity
at the same time.
I'm so glad I got out dinosaurs.
I mean technically they are dinosaurs,
but not real dinosaurs, I like the penguins.
- [Audience Member 4] When penguins swim,
do their feathers help keep the warm
along with the countercurrent heat exchange?
- The question is how penguins stay warm,
whether they need other features
other than countercurrent heat exchange.
They do.
Penguins have a really great ancilitory layer.
So if you slice a penguin in half, which we have done,
we're gonna have a plastinated penguin in our exhibit,
so it's basically preserved by just turning the tissues
into plastic essentially.
You'll see the feathers, they're really thick layer,
it's like wearing a big downy coat.
So they're waterproof on the outside
because they use oil from this gland in their tails,
and then they're downy underneath that,
that helps trap air and helps trap heat.
And then under that they tend to have a pretty thick layer
of fat, like blubber.
And so together the feathers and the blubber waterproof
and insulate them.
The flippers don't have much fat,
they don't have much of anything.
If you dissect a penguin wing,
it's like feathers and right under that
is basically bone and it's all tendons.
So the muscles almost end here
and the rest is just tendons going out
because they don't need to fold it or anything.
So I always say penguin wings would be the worst bar snack,
like a whole bucket of penguin wings,
you'd get like two bites.
Would have to have pretty good sauce
to make it worth your time.
Yeah, enough beer to eat one penguin wing.
(Daniel laughs)
- [Audience Member 2] We'll do one more question.
Have the penguins methods of protecting their eggs
and offspring as well as themselves
changed at all through their evolutionary times?
- The question is whether penguin's methods
for defending their eggs and chicks have changed
over evolutionary time.
I don't know.
We don't have any fossil eggs older
than a couple hundred years,
so we don't really know if fossil penguin eggs
were different than modern penguin eggs.
I think one obvious difference is if you had Kumimanu,
you see little penguins getting attacked by skua
like the seagull would land and you could just step on it
and wouldn't really matter.
So I think the large species were invulnerable
probably to some predators
that might bother little penguins today.
Other than that,
it's likely that the male and female
raised the egg together,
which is what all living penguins do.
And that's because it takes a lot of effort
to grow those chicks 'til they can
before the season change,
something was raised their chicks over six months
or more of time.
So I think it would likely be cooperative and similar,
but we don't really have any eggs yet,
so maybe someone will find one.
- [Host] Thanks very much, Dr. Kspepka
That was a lovely talk, very interesting
- Thank you.