Recent News

A Penguin Conveyor Belt?
Only one species of penguin lives in South Africa today, but 5 million years ago there were four. Where did they all come from? A new study with fellow penguin paleontologist Daniel Thomas reveals that rather than radiating from a single ancestor shared with modern African penguins, each of these species arrived separately. The data suggest they rode the South Atlantic Gyre to make the crossing from South America.
Read the paper free here.
Coverage at Scientific American
Discuss the Article at March of the Fossil Penguins

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Fossil Penguin Feathers
Penguins have the most highly modified feathers of any birds. New fossils reveal the feathers of an ancient extinct penguin for the first time. Inkayacu paracasensis is a new 36 million year old species discovered in Peru. Fossil feathers and skin from this species reveal that penguins evolved their tiny, scale-like flattened feathers deep in the past. Microscopic pigment bearing structures show these feathers were gray and reddish-brown.
See the paper in Science here.
My Guest Article at Scientific American
Video and Press Release at NCSU
Blog Article at March of the Fossil Penguins
Coverage from: New York Times, The Guardian, Scope, Wired.

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Reconstruction of the Mongolian sauropod Erkeru ellisoni by Jason Brougham

Recent Research Highlights

New Svelte Fossil Penguins

Two new species of elegantly proportioned penguins are covered in our latest article in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Over the past two years, I teamed up with Ewan Fordyce, Tatsuro Ando and Craig Jones to study some amazing penguins. Kairuku waitaki and Kairuku grebneffi lived about 27 million years ago in New Zealand when much of Zealandia was submerged below shallow seas. Kairuku penguins were very tall and quite slender compared to todays penguins, and were the largest of a fauna of five different penguin species known from the Kokoamu Greensand.

You can read the article free here.

NCSU Press release. SVP Press release.

University of Otago Press release. My own blog coverage.

Fossil Kairuku Penguins in the News:

Live television interview on BBC World News.

Radio interview on CBC’s Quirks and Quarks.

More coverage from BBC, National Geographic, Wired Science, US News & World Report, Scientific American, Discovery News, Audubon Magazine, CBS News, ABC News, Otago Daily Times (NZ), The Guardian, MSNBC,

China Daily, Washington Post, Times of India, Sydney Morning Herald, and the Toronto Star.

Sauropod Dinosaurs and Biogeography
Erketu ellisoni is an incredibly long-necked sauropod from Mongolia. New bones from this dinosaur and other species are providing more information about the evolutionary history of the Titanosauriformes. Our recent study indicates that a Chinese sauropod once thought to be a close relative of the famous Brachiosaurus actually belongs on the same branch of the sauropod tree as Erketu. Brachiosaurs therefore appear to have never reached Asia, perhaps because an ancient seaway called the Turgai Strait prevented their dispersal from western continents.

The paper in American Museum Novitates is available for free.
New York Times coverage of the original announcement of Erketu in 2006.

Turtle with a Smart-Car Sized Shell

Carbonemys cofrinii, the “coal turtle”, is a new species of gigantic side-necked turtle from Colombia. NCSU graduate student Edwin Cadena discovered this amazing beast in ~58 million year old deposits at the expansive Cerrejon Mine. Smaller turtle shells found at the mine have crocodile bite marks, but Carbonemys feared no predator because of its giant size. As an omnivore, it feasted on whatever it wanted.

Popular Coverage of Carbonemys

NCSU Press release. CBS News Coverage. News and Observer article. Daily Mail article.

Wired News article. My own blog coverage. Interview w/ Edwin Cadena on CBC’s “As It Happens”.

Artwork by Liz Bradford