Penguin walkabouts and sinking continents

One of the wonderful things about writing this blog every day is that it means I'm constantly learning stuff myself.

Today's topic is a good example, and kind of a curious one because it touches on three topics about which I usually credit myself with knowing a good deal, and those are geology, paleontology, and ornithology.  But because of my buddy and twin-separated-at-birth Andrew Butters, whose wonderful blog Potato Chip Math you should definitely subscribe to, I ended up learning some really cool stuff about three subjects near and dear to my heart.

The link Andrew sent me led me to a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society called "Ancient Crested Penguin Constrains Timing of Recruitment into Seabird Hotspot," which analyzes some three-million-year-old (Pliocene Epoch) penguin fossils found on the North Island.  Careful study of these fossils, of a species called Eudyptes atatu, led the researchers to the conclusion that penguins in general might have their origins not in Antarctica, as you might imagine (I know I did), but in the "lost continent" of Zealandia.

(If I can indulge a fourth interest, linguistics, the scientific name Eudyptes atatu comes from Greek and Maori roots, respectively, and means "good diver from the dawn of time."  Which I think is a pretty awesome name.) 

Anyhow, I don't know about you, but I'd never heard of Zealandia.  The article Andrew sent (from the site Science Alert) said that Zealandia was a former continent that basically sank.  This sounded a little suspicious to me; Atlantis notwithstanding, continents don't sink.  The edges can be more or less covered with water depending on the extent of polar ice and the sea level, but pieces of continental crust (being thick and relatively cold) just get carried along by whatever plate they're sitting on.  So they can move, split, and join, sort of like a big free-floating game of Tetris with irregularly-shaped pieces and no rules.  But you don't make much new continental crust, and what you've got pretty much is what you're stuck with.  (The Laurentian Highlands of Québec and Ontario, for example, has been around since Precambrian times, dating back 540 million years.)

So the idea of a continent (or most of it) sinking seemed pretty far-fetched to me.  But that, apparently, is exactly what happened.

A map (courtesy of NOAA) showing the former extent of Zealandia, outlined in pink

Zealandia used to be a lush rainforest -- think New Guinea or Borneo -- but subsidence gradually reduced its size, till by the beginning of the Miocene Epoch 23 million years ago, all that remained above sea level were New Zealand and New Caledonia, and the other 93% of it lay beneath the waves.  This greatly increased the distance to the nearest land mass (Australia) and effectively isolated New Zealand entirely, which is why it has such a unique flora and fauna today.

The other continent that Zealandia used to be near was Antarctica, and from their homeland of Zealandia they colonized the (at the time much closer) southern continent, which then slid away because of plate tectonics, moving to its present position near the South Pole and taking the penguins with it.  

But the fossils of Eudyptes atatu strongly point to a New Zealand origin for penguins in general, even though the only ones that have survived there to modern times are the Fiordland Penguin (Eudyptes pachyrhynchus), the Erect-crested Penguin (Eudyptes sclateri), the Snares Penguin (Eudyptes robustus), the Yellow-eyed Penguin (Megadyptes antipodes), and the Little Penguin (Eudyptula minor).  (You can see from the scientific names that the first three are in the same genus as the fossil species; whether they are descendants, or only cousins, isn't known.)

So that was today's opportunity to learn something about geology, paleontology, and ornithology.  Thanks again to Andrew for alerting me to the research, which I had somehow missed entirely.  Fun stuff, not least because it involves penguins, which are some of the most adorable birds in the world, if I may be allowed to interject a completely non-scientific opinion into the mix.

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To the layperson, there's something odd about physicists' search for (amongst many other things) a Grand Unified Theory, that unites the four fundamental forces into one elegant model.

Why do they think that there is such a theory?  Strange as it sounds, a lot of them say it's because having one force of the four (gravitation) not accounted for by the model, and requiring its own separate equations to explain, is "messy."  Or "inelegant."  Or -- most tellingly -- "ugly."

So, put simply; why do physicists have the tendency to think that for a theory to be true, it has to be elegant and beautiful?  Couldn't the universe just be chaotic and weird, with different facets of it obeying their own unrelated laws, with no unifying explanation to account for it all?

This is the question that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder addresses in her wonderful book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physicists Astray.  She makes a bold statement; that this search for beauty and elegance in the mathematical models has diverted theoretical physics into untestable, unverifiable cul-de-sacs, blinding researchers to the reality -- the experimental evidence.

Whatever you think about whether the universe should obey aesthetically pleasing rules, or whether you're okay with weirdness and messiness, Hossenfelder's book will challenge your perception of how science is done.  It's a fascinating, fun, and enlightening read for anyone interested in learning about the arcane reaches of physics.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Big bird

There's a peculiar fascination that people have with things that are oversized.  It's part of the fascination with dinosaurs, supermassive black holes, supervolcanoes, massive meteor strikes, megacyclones, and the like, with the added frisson that those can also kill you in nasty ways.

But just size can be impressive, irrespective of the likelihood of getting eaten, blown away, disintegrated, or whatnot.  Take, for example, two fossil bird species discovered last week in New Zealand.

The first is a parrot, dubbed Heracles inexpectatus, an accurate moniker given that it translates roughly to "unexpected bigass critter."  H. inexpectatus stood a meter tall, and the scientists who discovered it said that its bill was such that it could "crack open most food sources," which seems to me to be code for "that could easily include your skull."  While most parrots are fruit and seed-eaters, carnivorous parrots are not without precedent -- the kea, a large parrot species also from New Zealand, not only eats baby seabirds, it's been known to attack sheep and take bites of fat from their backs.

H. inexpectatus, being over twice as big, could have done a great deal more damage than that.  With H. inexpectatus, if Polly wants a cracker, you better fucking well give Polly a cracker or Polly will turn you into the next item on the menu.

The good thing (from our standpoint, anyhow) is that H. inexpectatus went extinct 19 million years ago.  So that's one less thing to worry about, nasty-death-wise.

Then there's the even larger penguin fossil, also from New Zealand, that was discovered by a team from Canterbury Museum in Christchurch.  This beast, dubbed Crossvallia waiparensis, stood 1.6 meters tall and weighed 80 kilograms -- in other words, outsizing a good many human beings.

[Image courtesy of the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand]

Being a writer of speculative fiction, this immediately put me in mind of the enormous albino penguins in H. P. Lovecraft's brilliant novella "At the Mountains of Madness," in which an expedition to Antarctica ends very, very badly for 90% of the characters.  In the story, the penguins themselves aren't dangerous (although they seem to be at first) but start acting bizarrely when something appears that is -- namely, Shoggoths, one of Lovecraft's more nightmarish creations, a blob-like shape-shifter whose favorite hobby is pulling people's limbs out of their sockets.  So even though no one is killed by an enormous penguin in the story, seeing this picture did give me a shudder.

Although Paul Scofield, senior curator of the Canterbury Museum, said, "When the Crossvallia species were alive, New Zealand and Antarctica were very different from today – Antarctica was covered in forest and both had much warmer climates."  Which is kind of the way Lovecraft described things.  So if you go to Antarctica and get dismembered by a Shoggoth, you can't say you weren't warned.

In any case, like the humongous parrot, the humongous penguins are no more.  They were around even earlier than H. inexplicatus, having reached their peak during the Paleocene Epoch, between 55 and 65 million years ago.  Generally, clement climate and plentiful food leads to animals evolving to become larger, so it's speculated that this is what was going on with MegaPenguin and SuperParrot.  Whatever the cause, though, they're pretty impressive.

So that's our cool science story for today.  Something to keep in mind when you feed the chickadees.  The little twittering feathery guys at your bird feeder may not look very impressive now, but in the past, they had some cousins that could kick your ass into the middle of next week.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone interested in astronomy -- Finding Our Place in the Universe by French astrophysicist Hélène Courtois.  Courtois gives us a thrilling tour of the universe on the largest scales, particularly Laniakea, the galactic supercluster to which the Milky Way belongs, and the vast and completely empty void between Laniakea and the next supercluster.  (These voids are so empty that if the Earth were at the middle of one, there would be no astronomical objects near enough or bright enough to see without a powerful telescope, and the night sky would be completely dark.)

Courtois's book is eye-opening and engaging, and (as it was just published this year) brings the reader up to date with the latest information from astronomy.  And it will give you new appreciation when you look up at night -- and realize how little of the universe you're actually seeing.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]