If I remember correctly there were a number of giant penguins here in New Zealand along with the world's largest bird, the Moa, and the world's largest eagle which preyed on the moa.
Moa were the tallest known birds (though probably mostly kept their heads down), but elephant birds of Madagascar and Dromornis stirtoni of Australia were more than twice as heavy as well as quite tall.
Penguins still fly, they just fly through water instead of air - if you look at a video of a penguin swimming, the motion is exactly the same as flying, it's just the wings that have adapted to the denser medium.
Tangential: there were a bunch of big birds around shortly after 65mya (these penguins, terror birds in the americas, hell Australia still has the cassowary) . These are always understood to be modern-bird-like but bigger, not dinosaur-like.
Is this really known to be the case?
Maybe equivalently - are these big birds known to have evolved from tiny birds (yes birds-are-dinosaurs, look past it) that survived the 65mya cataclysm? Or instead could they just be big dinosaurs that survived? Is the marked distinction between therapods < 65mya and 65mya < birds really backed by evidence, or is at least some of it down to our preconceptions of what animals in these two eras looked like?
H.P. Lovecraft "At the Mountains of Madness", 1931 describes these creatures from an ancient civilization in Antartica, millions of years ago: a "penguin... of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness."
Lovecraft was inspired by scientific expeditions to Antarctica that were in the news at the time, but the ancient, giant penguins are all his...
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 61.3 ms ] threadbig m! fan btw
Truly.
http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode23.htm
Is this really known to be the case?
Maybe equivalently - are these big birds known to have evolved from tiny birds (yes birds-are-dinosaurs, look past it) that survived the 65mya cataclysm? Or instead could they just be big dinosaurs that survived? Is the marked distinction between therapods < 65mya and 65mya < birds really backed by evidence, or is at least some of it down to our preconceptions of what animals in these two eras looked like?
Lovecraft was inspired by scientific expeditions to Antarctica that were in the news at the time, but the ancient, giant penguins are all his...
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx