David Middleton’s “Scale and Context” Guest
If global warming is bad for penguins, why were there giant penguins in the Paleocene?
FEBRUARY 9, 2023
Fossil bones of the largest penguin that ever lived unearthed in New Zealand
by Sarah Collins, University of CambridgeThe fossilized bones of two newly described species of penguin, one of which is believed to be the largest penguin ever lived—weighs more than 150 kg, more than three times the size of the largest living penguin. —was unearthed in New Zealand.
An international team, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, reported this finding in Journal of Paleontology. The paper’s senior author, Alan Tennyson from New Zealand Museum Te Papa Tongarewa, discovered the fossil in 57-million-year-old rocks on a beach in North Otago, on New Zealand’s South Island, since 2016. until 2017.
[…]
Co-author Dr Daniel Field from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences said: “Fossils provide us with evidence of the history of life, and sometimes that evidence is really surprising. “Many early fossil penguins reached enormous sizes, easily dwarfing the largest penguins alive today. Our new species, Kumimanu fordycei, is the largest fossil penguin ever discovered—at approximately 350 pounds, it should have been heavier. [basketball player] Shaquille O’Neal at the height of his dominance!”
[…]
The paper paywall. However, it is quite certain that these are fossils of Shaq-sized penguins (Shaquins) that lived about 57 million years ago, during the Paleocene Epoch.
Paleocene Temperature and CO2
Shaquins thrived when Earth’s average surface temperature could be 4-6 °C warmer than today, with CO2 in the atmosphere2 concentrations anywhere from 400 to 3,500 ppmv.
Older is to the left on the following chart:
Paleocene/Eocene Ice… Or without them
We have been bombarded by claims that global warming and reduced sea ice will push the largest extant penguin to extinction.
Antarctic emperor penguins in danger of extinction due to climate crisis
By Ashley Strickland, CNN
Published 9:16 AM EDT, Saturday, October 29, 2022CNN —
As the Antarctic emperor penguins become increasingly threatened by the climate crisis, the flightless seabirds will receive new protections under the Endangered Species Act, aka the Endangered Species Act. ESA.
With global warming sea ice melt penguins depend on their survival, the US Fish and Wildlife Service now classifies the species as threatened. The federal agency lists “endangered species as endangered or threatened regardless of their country of origin”.
[…]
If greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at their current rate, leading to warmer temperatures and melting Antarctic sea ice, 98% of the emperor penguin population could disappear completely by 2100, according to the report. a study published last year in the journal Global change biology.
“The world needs to take aggressive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions now, and the Paris Climate Agreement targets must be met to help prevent further population decline,” said Jenouvrier. .
[…]
Right… Modern penguins will become extinct by RCP8.5 and melting ice… While the largest extinct species of penguin thrived in a world that is virtually ice-free year-round.
Older is to the right on the following chart:
Shaquins thrived 15-20 million years before the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet, at a time when year-round ice was pretty much restricted to very high altitudes and sea ice (to the extent it existed) would be season.
“It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Penguins have clearly evolved in a much warmer world that is largely ice-free year-round and adapted to a much colder world with year-round ice caps and sea ice. They are adapted to the late glacial and interglacial phases of the Pleistocene… But they can’t leave from now?
Modern ~1 °C increases since pre-industrial times do not even escape Quaternary noise levels. Another 1 °C increase won’t even escape Quaternary noise levels, much less the Paleocene warmth. Remember that the HadSST3 data has a much higher resolution than18O timeline. The amplitude of the proxy time series on time scales from decades to hundreds of years should be considered the minimum of the true variability on those time scales, due to its much lower resolution than instrumental data (Ljungqvist, FC 2010).
Ponder this: Penguins first appeared in the fossil record about 61 million years ago, just 4 million years after the K-Pg extinction. They thrived through the much warmer and colder climates of the Cenozoic Era, but they were expected to perish with a 1 °C increase in temperature (1 °C was “cooked”).
Penguins are one of the most iconic groups of birds, both a textbook example of the evolution of secondary aquatic ecosystems and a sentinel for the impact of global change on ecosystem healthfirst. Although often associated with Antarctica in the popular imagination, penguins originated more than 60 million years ago (Mya), evolving wing diving and losing the ability to fly long before their formation. into polar ice sheets2. Over time, penguins have evolved the set of morphological, physiological and behavioral features that make them arguably the most specialized of all extant birds. These adaptations have allowed penguins to colonize some of the most extreme environments on Earth.
The notion that penguins are critically endangered by modern climate change seems absurd to me. Even so, I guess we cannot rule out the possibility that global warming could lead to the return of giant electric penguins…
Presenter
Chapman, Graham, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam. Scott of Antarctica. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Part 2, Episode 10. 1970.
Cole, TL, Zhou, C., Fang, M. et al. Genomic insights into the penguin’s secondary aquatic transition. Nat . commune 13, 3912 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31508-9
Jenouvrier, S., Che-Castaldo, J., Wolf, S., Holland, M., Labrousse, S., LaRue, M., Wienecke, B., Fretwell, P., Barbraud, C., Greenwald, N ., Stroeve, J., & Trathan, PN (2021). The Call of Emperor Penguins: A Legal Response to Species Threatened by Climate Change. Global change biology27, 5008–5029.
Ksepka, D., Field, D., Heath, T., Pett, W., Thomas, D., Giovanardi, S., & Tennyson, A. (2023). The largest known penguin fossil provides insight into the early evolution of rhomboid body size and flipper anatomy. Journal of Paleontology, 1-20. doi:10.1017/jpa.2022.88
Ljungqvist, FC 2010. “A new reconstruction of temperature variation in the Extratropical Northern Hemisphere over the past two millennia”. Geografiska Annaler: Natural Geography, Practice. 92 A(3), pp. 339-351, September 2010. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-459.2010.00399.x
Pagani, Mark, Michael Arthur & Katherine Freeman. (1999). "Miocene evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide". palaeontology. 14. 273-292. 10.1029/1999PA900006.
Pearson, PN and Palmer, MR: Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere over the past 60 million years, Nature406, 695–699, https://doi.org/10.1038/35021000, 2000.
Royer, et al., 2001. Paleontological evidence for near-current CO levels2 In part of the Third Reich. Science June 22, 2001: 2310-2313. DOI:10.12
Steinthorsdottir, M., Vajda, V., Pole, M., and Holdgate, G., 2019, “Average levels of Eocene pCO2 as indicated by the stomata of fossil plants in the Southern Hemisphere”: Geology, verse 47, p. 914–918, https://doi.org/10.1130/G46274.1
Zachos, JC, Pagani, M., Sloan, LC, Thomas, E. & Billups, K. “Trends, Rhythms and Aberrations in Global Climate from 65 Ma to Present”. Science 292, 686–-693 (2001).
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