The largest penguin species, the Palaeeudyptes klekowskii stood at around 6 foot 8 inches. Wow, the penguin, should it have survived until today, would have rivaled basketball players’ heights! The mountainous bird’s 37-million-year-old fossilized remains were uncovered in Antarctica. The "colossus penguin" was truly the Godzilla of aquatic birds, as Tree Hugger details:
Scientists calculated the penguin's dimensions by scaling the sizes of its bones against those of modern penguin species. They estimate that the bird probably would have weighed about 250 pounds — again, roughly comparable to LeBron James. By comparison, the largest species of penguin alive today, the emperor penguin, is "only" about 4 feet tall and can weigh as much as 100 pounds.
The fossil was found at the La Meseta formation on Seymour Island, an island in a chain of 16 major islands around the tip of the Graham Land on the Antarctic Peninsula. (It's the region that is the closest part of Antarctica to South America.) The area is known for its abundance of penguin bones, though in prehistoric times it would have been much warmer than it is today.
P. klekowskii towers over the next largest penguin ever discovered, a 5-foot-tall bird that lived about 36 million years ago in Peru. Since these two species were near contemporaries, it's fun to imagine a time between 35 and 40 million years ago when giant penguins walked the Earth, and perhaps swam alongside the ancestors of whales.
Image via Tree Hugger
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That would be a big bird indeed.
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