| Summary: | Penguins evolved more than 60 million years ago. The rich fossil record of these birds has revealed unexpected forms such as giant (300lb+) penguins, spear-billed penguins, and penguins with red and grey feathers. These fossils provide a window into how penguins lost flight and adapted to changing environmental conditions such as drifting continents, reorganization of Southern Ocean currents, and the onset of glacial-interglacial cycles. Increasingly, scientists are combining fossil data with observations from living penguins to gain a synthetic understanding of penguin evolution. Just this year, the complete genomes of all living penguins were sequenced, providing once unimaginable insight into species boundaries, aquatic adaptations to everything from vision to metabolism, and even population expansions and crashes during the last Ice Age.
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