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Human-sized penguins roamed Peru desert 42 million years ago: Study

peruvian giant penguin species 9

It is somewhat like a tailored-tale for kids with human-sized penguins and King Kong-like seals engaged in human-like behaviors and talk alike man! But it seems, such fantasizing have been referred from prehistoric ages.

You can have just the like feeling, as you too discover what a North Carolina State University paleontologist unearthed from the Atacama Desert in Peru – human-sized Penguins!

The fossils of the two giant penguins, unlike the other such giant-animal finds, didn’t seem to need ice for survival.

This find provided the first complete skull from an ancient giant penguin, revealing the third largest penguin known, which stood about 4.5 feet (1.5 meters) tall! The fossil finds of the other new penguin species dates back to 42 million years!

It was amazingly about three feet or a meter tall, comparable to today’s second largest living penguin — the king penguin as most modern South American penguins are 2 feet or 0.6 meter tall or even less.

Yes, the discovery clearly reveals that penguins migrated to the equatorial regions more than 30 million years earlier than thought. And, that was predicted to be one of the warmest periods in the last 65 million years.

Cuing the popular image of penguins’ choice of icebergs as their favorite habitat, the finding surely kicks up queries on — both this popular thought as well as the ancient climate of the Peru desert!

So, is it less to be feared of losing the penguins’ present day habitats to global warming? – as they may perhaps have inherited their ancestral habits of thriving without ice as well, perhaps in the desert!

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