20 Black-and-White Facts About Penguins

Today is World Penguin Day! Just ask Benedict Cumberbatch. He should just say "woggin." It's a good time to learn some things about penguins. For example, I knew that emperor penguins were the largest species, but I never thought about what a four-foot bird would be like up close. That's almost to my shoulder! So, in the picture above, piper Gilbert Kerr is about eight feet tell, or else that bird is some other penguin species. There are plenty of other things to learn about penguins, like

5. Fossils place the earliest penguin relative at some 60 million years ago, meaning an ancestor of the birds we see today survived the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.

6. Penguins ingest a lot of seawater while hunting for fish, but a special gland behind their eyes—the supraorbital gland—filters out the saltwater from their blood stream. Penguins excrete it through their beaks, or by sneezing.

See more facts about penguins at Mental Floss.


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