Speculative evolution: Long necked penguin
The Long-Necked Penguin (Longisauravis bergei) is the largets extant species of penguin. Diverging from the rest of crown Sphenisciformes around 30 million years ago, it likely evolved from one of the various giant clades. Its earliest fossil relative is Sphenisgavia aotearoa, a similarly sized species from the Miocene of New Zealand, differing mostly due to its longer, more loong-like beak.
The Long-Necked Penguin is a massive bird. On land it stands at 4.5 meters tall, its long neck half of its body length. Special valves in its veins allow the heart to pump blood when it stands on land. Still, most of its life is spent in the open ocean. Its long neck is used to trail on the ocean floor, much like extinct plesiosaurs did. It is itself prey to great whites and orcas.
The Long-Necked Penguin’s range stretches across the Southern Ocean, sometimes occuring as northwards as New Zealand. It spends most of its life on the sea, but every two years it gathers in nesting colonies on a select few archipelagos like Kerguelen. Like most penguins, it has a long incubation period of around 40 days, it’s egg almost as large as an ostrich’s. Like emperor and king penguins the male holds it in its legs, and when the chick hatches the mother returns from the sea to feed it. Both parents raise the chick for upwards of sixth months until they’re almost adult sized and their feathers shifted from downy to hydrodynamic. Sexual maturity is reached at around 12 years of age.
The Long-Necked Penguin rarely encountered humans in its pre-colonial ranges. It was hunted by the Selk’nam people and the Maori occasionally encountered it, leading to “eel penguin taniwhas” in their oral traditions. The advent of european mass whaling threatened the birds with extinction, with less than 30 surviving by 1933. Thankfully, conservation efforts were successful, and the population currently sits at around 800 birds. Their melodic calls (“WAH-WAH-WAH”) have earned them a mixed reputation as both elegant and majestic and ungodly silly, and it is a popular subject for animation, be it cartoons or mature nature pieces.
