The Ancients - Prehistoric Penguins

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

When the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, one remarkable avian survivor traded the skies for the sea. Tristan Hughes and paleontologist Dr Steve Brusatte explore how prehistoric penguins emerged on ancient Zealandia, lost their flight and grew into colossal apex predators. But how did these giant ocean rulers eventually shrank to conquer the frozen continent of Antarctica?MORETerror BirdsListen to AppleListen to SpotifyDinosaurs: The Last DaysListen to AppleListen to SpotifyPresented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Joseph Knight and McKenna Fernandez. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch HEREWant even MORE Ancients? Sign up to History Hit for early access ad-free, plus exclusive subscriber-only episodes. PLUS with a History Hit subscription you can watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Penguins. Today we think of them as the fluffy, small, Antarctic birds, perfectly built to dart through the cold waters of the southern hemisphere, hunting prey tens, if not hundreds of metres beneath the water, the iconic aquatic bird. But penguins weren't always so cute and cuddly. They descend from dinosaurs. And for millions of years, penguins were prehistoric apex predators in the southern ocean, the largest being more than six foot tall, earning the name Colossus. Yes, the largest prehistoric penguins that we know of, they weren't just ferocious sea predators, they were

also the size of many NBA basketball players today. So what do we know about these early penguins? How do they emerge after the extinction of the dinosaurs? And how do we get from these prehistoric beasts to the lovable creatures we know today. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of prehistoric penguins. Our guest is Dr. Steve Brassati, personal chair of paleontology and evolution at Edinburgh University, and the author of the brand new book, The Story of Birds. Steve, welcome back. Great to have you on the show, as always. As always, we talked about terrabirds.

Now we can talk about penguins. I don't think I've been so excited for an episode. Ever. In some time. And that's a high bar. Okay, okay, okay. Try to live up to it. Because these Cuban-Ga-oldly things, they have their own prehistoric story when they weren't so small.

And, yeah, as we know them today, they have their own prehistoric story. Very cool one, too. They do. And I must say a shout out to my son. my six-year-old son, Anthony, this little plush penguin here, it looks like something I could have just plucked off his bed this morning. Not that I would have done that, you know, before I came to meet you guys, but he loves penguins, and he must have at least 10, maybe, if not 20 stuffed plush penguins of all kinds. People give him to him his gifts all the time. Somebody goes to, you know,

to New Zealand or to South Africa or somewhere, you know, a family friend or a friend of a friend, and they know to bring Anthony a penguin because he loves them that much. And in fact, if you ask him what his favorite dinosaur is, you know, you might expect a six-year-old boy to say D-Rex or Spinosaurus or Velociraptor, but he'll say penguins because he knows birds evolved from dinosaurs, of course, because I teach him the good stuff. But he's not super into the ferocious canonical dinosaurs, but he absolutely loves penguins.

And what he didn't know, but what he knows now and what he loves is that penguins do have this prehistoric past where they weren't always these cute, cuddly, fluffy, charismatic little creatures. They had a darker history. And can we also say that penguins are dinosaurs? They absolutely are, you know, in the sense that all modern birds are dinosaurs. And the way, look, I know it's weird to think about it. And I get this all the time, you know, in the story of birds and in my new book, you know,

the early part of the book is establishing what we mean when we say birds are dinosaurs. how birds evolve from dinosaurs. And I know it sounds weird because when you look at a sparrow or you look at a crow or you look at a penguin doesn't look anything like a T-Rex, like a triceratops. But dinosaurs were a very diverse group. They lived for a long time. They're kind of like mammals today. There's all kinds of mammals, big ones and small ones, bats and whales and elephants and horses

and mice and people and everything in between. Similar with dinosaurs. There were lots of different types of dinosaurs. And there was one type of dinosaurs. And there was one type of dinosaur that got small, grew wings, and started to fly. Those were the birds, similar to how there was one type of mammal that got small, grew wings, started to fly. Those are the bats.

So we should really think of birds as the dinosaur equivalent of a bat. But the difference, of course, of course, is that all the other dinosaurs have died, leaving only birds. And if you could imagine, I mean, it's kind of morbid because it means we wouldn't be here. but if every type of mammal died except for bats, that's kind of the world we're in with birds. So yes, birds are dinosaurs. It's not a technicality.

It's not a turn of phrase. They literally are part of the dinosaur family tree. They evolved from other dinosaurs. They are dinosaurs. That means that a penguin, when you see a penguin in a zoo, or if you're lucky enough to go on a cruise to Antarctica or to New Zealand to see penguins, you're looking at dinosaurs.

You're going dinosaur watching. And so how far back does the story, of penguins go? I would start the story at about 66 million years ago when the asteroid ended the age of dinosaurs and knocked off T-Rex and T-Rex and the long-necked

dinosaurs and all the classic ones. That really was the big turning point in dinosaur history. Pretty much everything with birds today came from that moment, hinged on that moment. Birds evolved before. There were birds around with T-Rex. There were proper birds

with wings and feathers that were flying and flapping and fluttering and gliding and soaring over the heads of T-Rex and triceratops and other dinosaurs. And so the classic features of birds, their feathers, their wings, their wishbones, their lightweight skeletons, their fast growth rates, their high metabolisms, those things all evolved from their dinosaur ancestors. But then the asteroid hit, and it more or less wiped the slate clean. And out of these few surviving birds came the many groups of birds that we know today, including penguins. And they all seem to have evolved quite rapidly. Many of these bird groups within the first few million years of that asteroid, there was just so

much empty space, so much abundant opportunity. If you were one of the lucky 25% of species to survive, you have these opportunities. And the birds did, and penguins came out of that. So I would start the story of penguins there. It's not that a penguin itself survived the asteroid. As far as we know, there were not proper penguins living before the asteroid during the time of T-Rex, but they show up in the fossil record quite soon after. And when they show up in the fossil record, have they lost the ability to fly already? Is that a big moment? That's right.

So one of the major things about penguins today is that they cannot fly. They are birds that cannot fly. Or at least they can't fly in the air. When you watch them swim underwater, they move their wings in a similar way. that other birds do in the air. So they're kind of using their wings to fly through the water, but they cannot fly in the air. They gave up that ability to fly,

and it was basically one of these evolutionary tradeoffs. They stopped flying in the air, they streamline their bodies into these torpedoes, and they turn their wings into flippers to be used for swimming. So they stopped flying in the air, they started swimming. The very first penguin fossils that we have, which are around 61 to 63 million years old, the dates always move around a little bit.

They are already penguins in the sense they don't fly in the air anymore. They have wings that look like paddles or like flippers. They were swimmers. So they had already made that trade-off. They're more primitive than modern penguins in some ways. Their paddle wings are not quite as big, not quite as powerful, but they are unmistakably penguins. And where in the world does this transition happen?

It happened in the South. everything in penguin evolution, as far as we know, has happened in the South. Penguins have only barely ever snuck just a little bit north of the equator. And these are the penguins today in the Galapagos. There are penguins. And they ride these cold water currents. That's why they're able to get north of the equator. But there have never been penguins as far as we know, but we're pretty certain of this because the fossil record is pretty good.

Never penguins here in Europe. Never penguins in Asia. Another never penguins in North America. Now, there used to be puffins that gave up the ability to fly that became these flightless swimming birds up north. Things like the Great Hawk. They were kind of the northern version of penguins. But they were not penguins. They were not closely related to penguins.

They were puffins. They were more closely related to gulls. So what seems to have happened over history is that you had these goal type of birds become these flightless swimmers up north. You had penguins do it down south. We don't know exactly where the first penguins live, but the oldest father. The fossils come from New Zealand, and there are still penguins in New Zealand today. So there's a good chance that the origin of penguins might have happened either on New Zealand or somewhere in that vicinity. In fact, New Zealand is basically the last remnant of what used to be an entire continent, like a real-life Atlantis.

It's basically under the waves, which maybe we'll get to. But maybe it was this lost continent of Zeelandia. Yes, let's explore this now. What is Zeelandia? It's a lost continent. It's a real Atlantis. You know, we talk all the time, and as I'm sure you guys do even more than me, about these legends from human history of sunken lands and lost worlds.

And Atlantis is always the one we learn about, you know, as kids. And it has this hold in our imagination. And I don't know, you would have to tell me the latest on what historians and archaeologists think about Atlantis. And if it was based on a certain flood or if it was based on a certain island. But I can tell you, there really is a lost sunken continent that does exist. that's there, but is mostly engulfed by water now, and that is Zeelandia. It is an entire continent that is nucleated around New Zealand and New Caledonia. They're the only parts that really emerge from the waves today. The rest of it is underwater, but it is very much a

continent. It has well-defined boundaries. It's made of the same types of rocks that continents are. So a continent isn't just something that's above the waves. No, no, you have to be made of a certain type of rock, basically granitic, you know, granite-type rocks to be a continent, and you have to have a coherent shape, and you have to have proper boundaries and so on. Zelandia fulfills all of those definitions. It's just that it's mostly submerged. And it was, at times, by the way, more emerged. I mean, there were times where a bunch of it would have been above water, and then it's sunken over time. And there are all these fossils that are down there under the sea of these incredible animals that once called Zeelandia.

And is this also kind of the epicenter when we're kind of exploring this early evolution of the penguin in those millions of years after the extinction of the dinosaurs and after the nuclear winter that followed? That's right. Exactly. So you had the southern continents used to be all joined together. Even before then, all the continents were joined together as Pangaea. But as Pangaea broke apart into north and south bits, then the south broke apart,

Zelandia was part of that southern bit. It was basically connected to Australia and to Antarctica. India and Madagascar were in there too, and then all those lands split apart. And it just so happened because of the tectonic plates and the motions of the earth in that area that most of Zelandia was submerged. I mean, there's terrible earthquakes in New Zealand, say like the Christchurch earthquake a decade or so ago. That's because it's at the junction of two big tectonic plates and it's the motion of those plates that has made Zeelandia fall below the sea. But it wasn't always that way. And so after the asteroid hit, a lot of it would have been emerged. It would have been visible. It would have been above sea level. And there are fossil sites in New Zealand today, in one of the last remnants that

still is above the water that are a few tens of millions of years old. And there's all kinds of fossil birds. All kinds of fossil birds. There's a few small little mammals, but not many. And this is really the core story of Zeelandia. It was this one part of the world that split off from the rest where dinosaurs continued to rule even after the asteroid. And no, it's not that T-Rex lived there or Triceratops, but its birds continued to be the biggest animals, the top predators, the top plant eaters. They continued to be the most diverse animals in the food chain in the near absence of mammals. And there were never any big mammals on New Zealand until of six or seven hundred years ago when some pretty big primates got there and changed things.

Oh, as in humans. Got it. There we go. So when do we start seeing in the fossil record from Zelandia in that area, when do we start seeing evidence of penguins? We see them not long after the asteroid. So really within a few million years of the asteroid. And penguins generally, their fossils are a bit more robust, a bit more sturdy than those

of other birds. Penguins don't have such hollowed out bones, such fragile bones because they're not flying in the air. And because they're swimming, they need somewhat heavier bones, you know, for ballast and so on. What that means is, generally speaking, it's easier to fossilize a penguin than it is to fossilize a sparrow or a hummingbird or something like that. And so the fossils of these penguins from New Zealand, from just a few million years after the asteroid, This is some of the direct fossil evidence that the story we get from DNA of modern birds is actually true. That story is you can imply from the DNA of modern birds that there was this big burst of evolution soon after the asteroid. And the fact that we find all these penguin fossils, that is corroborating evidence for what the DNA is suggesting.

Because I've got on my notes something like, Wynmanu, is that one of the early? Yeah, Wymru, the oldest one, yes. The oldest of the mole. Yes. The oldest current one, of course. There could be somebody out there as we speak in New Zealand, finding a slightly older one. You never know with fossils. But this is the oldest that we know of now and it lived within a few million years of the asteroid.

And to clarify as well, so the oceans at this time, we talked in the last episode with terror birds, how it was the brave new world for the birds, the small birds and the small mammals that survive that nuclear winter on land. but in the sea as well I guess that is also a brave new world at its time because the sea beasts of the past they are now of the past very much so they are so when that asteroid knocked off T-Rex and Triceratops and the pterodactals on land

it also knocked off the big reptiles in the ocean the mosasors the pleasosaurs and this is for similar reasons as to what happened on land the earth went dark and cold plants on land could not photosynthesize they couldn't make their own food So the ecosystems just collapsed like houses of cards in the ocean. The food webs are also based on light on these phytoplankton, these tiny microscopic creatures making their own food. That's the foundation of the ocean food.

So that crashed as well. So you had profound extinctions in the ocean as on land. And when these mosasaurus and pleasosaurs went extinct, and by the way, we have fossils of pleesiosaurus, particular from New Zealand. I mean, we know they were living in the south, right. to the very end of the Cretaceous, right before the asteroid hit. And then when they died, there was this job opening at the top of the food chain in the oceans. The big ferocious meat eaters, fish eaters, squid eaters, the biggest ones at the top of the food chain, they were gone. The same way T-Rex was gone on land. So there was a vacancy. And what filled that vacancy? Well, you might

say, well, what do we have today? Okay, today we have killer whales. We have big sharks, you know, great white sharks, and we used to have Megalodon and other giant sharks. And that's true. Those animals today basically fill the ecological roles that the mosasors and pleasesers left behind. But, but, but, but, and this is where the story turns. And this is where the fossil record tells us something absolutely astounding, that we would never know if we didn't have the fossils. And that is that it took the whales, the dolphins, the big sharks. It took them a while to reach the top of the food chain. Something else tops the food chain first. And the thing that topped the food chain first in the Southern Oceans, penguins. Penguins.

And so when we get like, because we mentioned Wymannu, so the oldest that we know penguin, even at that time, do we see the clear evolution of penguins? Are they clearly aquatic birds by this time? They definitely are. They are aquatic birds. They are swimming. They have the types of bones, denser bones that you would expect in a swimmer. They have their wings, but their wings have very much turned into a paddle or an oar.

They could not fly. They don't have the same bones of the chest with the huge flight muscles, you know, the birds that fly in the air have. So we know they were aquatic. The thing about Waimano, though, and these very oldest penguins is they are big. They are big. They are basically the size of like the modern day emperor penguins, which are the biggest penguins or bigger. So the oldest penguins we have are quite big. And it seems like the smaller penguins today, the cute ones that we all know, you know, the rock hoppers and the Gen 2s and the Adelis, these things are secondarily small.

They had bigger ancestors in the past. They've got smaller over time. So early on, penguins were bigger. Weimannu was pretty big, but it wasn't the biggest one ever. So the penguin story, official penguins begins with Weimano. and the southern ocean, like the seas in the summer, the seas in the southern hemisphere, New Zealandia, are theirs for the taking?

Yes. But it doesn't stop with Imanu, does it? How do penguins diversify from there? They got bigger. They got much bigger. Forget this. Forget this. This tiny little thing.

This would be like one of their chicks, maybe. Maybe even too big for one of their chicks. Some of these penguins were huge. One of them is called the colossus. This penguin. Clues in the name. And that says it all. It is a nickname that this penguin very much deserves.

This penguin was the size of a gorilla. So imagine a penguin weighing 300 kilos or something like that, the size of a gorilla. I mean, imagine that. And do we know much about it? It's shape. Should we just be thinking of a massive emperor penguin today or something slightly different? The shape, best we can tell from the first we can tell from the first. fossils would have been recognizable to us. It wasn't like a totally weird-shaped penguin. It's something

that if we saw it, we would know it right away as a penguin. I mean, it would have basically walked upright on land, only on his hind legs, standing upright, kind of like a person. That's one of the things that makes penguins very charismatic that kind of look like little people waddling around. So these colossus penguins and the Waimano penguins and so on, they would have walked like that and stood like that on land. They had the flippers for swimming in the water. And they had long snouts. They had long beaks that they used to catch fish. So they were the top predators in these oceans. And they were mostly swimming, chasing down fish and squid and maybe other penguins. Again, and some fish then would have been quite big. But this was before there were any whales that were in the water.

whales only entered the water about 55 million years ago, about 10 million years or so after the asteroid and it was mammals with hooves things that looked like little deer. They were the ancestors of whales. The whale story is like Bambi turning into Moby Dick over evolutionary time.

But that came later after the penguins had started to give up their throne. And so it's interesting also the types of food they would have hunted we still would think it's largely fish and squid and the like. But you're interesting. He said smaller penguins there as well. It's that kind of diversity.

Yeah, that's what I think. I don't think we know for sure. As far as I know, we don't have direct evidence. It's not like we have bite marks from a giant penguin beak on the bones of a smaller penguin or gut contents, you know, a last meal. We do get those kind of direct evidences for fossil diet in the fossil record. I don't think we have it for penguins. I could be wrong. But I'm guessing there might have been some smaller penguins then that they could have hunted.

But I don't know for sure. Definitely they were hunting fish and squid, though. That's pretty clear. And just the shape of their beaks shows it. I mean, it's a classic thing for fish eaters and squid eaters to have these long beaks that they could use to spear fish that could move quite quickly. You know, they're swimming, the fish are swimming, everything happens very fast underwater. And so these long beaks, they could open and close really quickly. They can grab things like pinchers, like tweezers.

And so those kind of beaks are very useful for eating fast-moving ocean prey. And that's what these early penguins had. And for how long do we think these penguins were then at the top of the food chain? And also, we talk about the waters around this lost Atlantis, this lost world of Zeelandia. Can we imagine them actually going quite far and wide across the southern hemisphere for that time as well? So what we know is that during that time, let's say, you know, between 66 and 60-ish million years ago when penguins were first getting started, the world was a lot different in so many ways. You know, the continents, of course, were in slightly different positions. Zelandia was more of its own landmass, not completely submerged or nearly completely submerged under the water.

And the world was warmer. This was the greenhouse age, really. It would be another 20 million years or so before the Earth started to get cooler. And that was just because of changes in ocean circulation patterns and other things. And that cooling trend eventually culminated in the ice ages. Just, you know, really, we're still in the ice age. We're just globally warming our way out of it. But when these first penguins lived, there would not have been a big ice cap on the South Pole.

There would not have been this icy, snowy, frigid Antarctica. The southern ocean was much warmer. Those land masses down there would have been proper land, not covered by glaciers or ice sheets. So the early history of penguins played out in a totally different world. And really, it was in that world. Penguins were the top predators. it seems like they persisted in that role for many millions of years, maybe 10 million years or so, maybe even a bit more.

Then eventually they were replaced by the killer wells and the big sharks that came later. And I don't think we know exactly why that is. I could be wrong. These are not the primary animals that I study. But I think it's still a bit of a mystery as to why there was that changeover. It might have had something to do with changes in ocean circulation, changes in global temperature. but what happens is penguins basically give up that crown as the top predators in the southern oceans. They're replaced by the killer whales and the big sharks, but it's not like penguins go extinct.

No, no, they just retire into a new lifestyle. They became these smaller, charming, charismatic, icy creatures, the ones that are emblems of the ice fields and the glaciers of the South. But that is not how they started. That's what they've done in their retirement. Gosh, okay. actually the reign of prehistoric penguins when they are apex predators in the grand scheme of things it's quite a small period of time and then as you say they retreat they become polar um they give up their crown as you say and i mean and then the rest of the prehistoric penguin

story i'm sure maybe this is like for a different topic of a different day but like they get smaller and then they kind of stay the shape how we see penguins today almost. I don't know how much we can fill in for the next few millions of years almost. Yeah, I think that's generally true. You know, and there are, there's a growing fossil record of penguins. And as I mentioned, it's just easier to fossilize a penguin than a lot of other birds. So every year there seems to be new fossils of penguins that are being found, especially in places like New Zealand. But penguins today also live in South Africa. You know, there's, and there's penguins that get up again to the Galapagos.

There's penguins that live in the southern part of South America. So they're more widespread than we might think, those of us that live in the north. And I'm very much one of these people. I think of penguins, what I think of all the South Pole and glaciers and ice and all that. But actually, they do, you know, they don't only live in those places. They're more widespread, but they only do live in the South. It seems like they're very dependent on where the ocean currents are, the cold water currents. And so it seems like that's been the case for at least a few tens of events.

millions of years. So penguins have changed a lot. You're right that they had a small run at the top of the food chain, you know, a small run. I don't know, you can compare it to a human empire that flourish for a small period of time or Lester City, you know, winning the Premier League for one year and then a few years later they're relegated. I mean, it was small, but it was stunning. It was spectacular. It was sublime, an age of gorilla-sized penguins patrolling the southern notions. Steve, I'm trying to think, is there anything else I can ask about prehistoric penguins? But I think we kind of recover most of it.

Yeah, I just say when I was writing the story of birds, you know, I didn't know a lot about penguins when I started writing the book. My real specialty is the first birds, the birds that evolved from the raptor dinosaurs, how dinosaurs evolved feathers and wings and started to fly. Actually, that's when my PhD thesis was on way back when. It was a big family tree of dinosaurs putting birds in their place, trying to understand their closest relatives. So when I've written this book, I've learned a lot about all kinds of birds that I knew a little bit about, but I quickly realized how Ignor and I was.

And it was such a joy learning about things like terror birds, like gorilla-sized penguins and demon ducks and elephant birds and these things. They were, you know, just a constant source of surprise. The more that I learned about these things and read about these things. And I'm totally converted now. I don't get it. Why are they not as iconic as T-Rex or a saber-toothed tiger? Every museum should have a terror bird. Every museum should have a gorilla-sized penguin.

These are amazing extinct creatures. And again, ones we would never know existed if we didn't have the fossils. So obviously, penguins take advantage of the seas being this brave new world. In our previous episode, we covered how terror birds take advantage of being apex predators in South America to get big and loose fight. Are there any other particular bird species? that you see really succeed, either they get bigger or they become the best at a particular thing, in those millions of years after the end of the dinosaurs, because if there's ever a time, it was during those millions of years, right?

Yeah. For evolution, this was not quite a blank slate because, of course, there were survivors, but this is about as close to a blank slate as you can get. The extinction was terrible. I mean, 75% of all species died. That's catastrophic. But out of that catastrophe, out of that apocalypse, came the opportunity for renewal and rebirth. And evolution really went into overdrive during this time.

And it did so not only in birds, but also in mammals. This is where we start to get all these big mammals that we know today, where the horses and the elephants and the primates and so on come from. We see it in fishes. There's a big bang in the evolution of fishes around that time. We see it in microscopic creatures in the ocean. There's a huge turnover. in the plankton and in the invertebrates that form the ocean food webs.

But I think birds really show this so well because you do get terror birds supersizing becoming top predators. You get penguin supersizing becoming the top fish eaters and squid eaters in the oceans. And you also get some birds that become the biggest plant eaters. And I believe some of these, but this is where the elephant birds, the demon ducks, the moas come in. These are all birds that were huge. All these birds, they were more or less kind of between the size of humans up to about, you know, 10 feet taller. So these are massive animals.

None of them could fly. And in fact, Moas, which lived in New Zealand, they lost their wings entirely. They're the only birds that have totally lost all traces of their wings. But all of these birds were plant eaters. They were the ones that were filling that niche left vacant by Triceratop. and the long-neck dinosaurs and the duck-billed dinosaurs, the big bulk-feeding, leaf-eating, and later grass-eating, plant eaters at the base of the food chain.

And I think they're sublime as well. I mean, elephant birds 10 feet tall, they weighed 1,600 pounds, laid eggs the size of watermelons, our ancestors. In fact, not even our ancestors. Homo sapiens, members of our own species, met them on Madagascar. Overlap with them for a while. Probably cause their extinction.

similar to Moas on New Zealand. When the Maori arrived, just really six, seven hundred years ago, this was the lost kingdom of the Moas. They were the biggest animals on New Zealand. There were lots of them. There were tons of different species. Moas were sublime. There's one species of Moa that the female was like three times the size of the male.

It's the biggest difference between males and females of any vertebrate species that we know up. Gosh. So these were sublime animals, and there's so many more examples. But the commonality here is just that the world changed so thoroughly, so quickly when the asteroid hit, there was this ecological vacuum. And those survivors had the opportunity to do incredible things. And many of them filled those niches left behind by the dead dinosaurs. I've got to ask about the demon ducks. What should we be imagining with a demon duck? So back home in Illinois, where I'm from, there are a lot of Canada geese. There's flocks of these things. They're basically feral. And I mean, these things, they, to me, they are terrors. They're demons. These things,

there can be hundreds of them in one of these flocks. And if they're out in your garden and in your yard, they will lay it to waste. I mean, the amount of grass they rip up to eat, the droppings they leave behind. Oh my God. They're like just an invading army. A demon duck, which was a very close relative of a modern Canada goose, they're all part of the same group on the family tree. A demon duck was about a hundred times heavier. Wow. Than a Canada goose. So when I think of a demon duck, I think of those flocks of these crazy mad geese back

home. And I think about them supersized up a hundred times a size. And that's what a demon duck would be. But thank God they were plant eaters. You know, they were not ferocious animals. And our human relatives did meet them. The first humans that got to Australia met the demon ducks. That's the only place where demon ducks lived was on Australia.

And our relatives, our distant forebears, met demon ducks, confronted demon ducks, cooked their eggs for breakfast, not long after the demon ducks were gone. So it's a bit of a sad story, but we did have a chance as a human species to meet these terrific animals. And the other one I want to ask, you've mentioned obviously the elephant birds in Madagascar. Gastornis. Gastornis, yeah. This is the one other name of a creature I want to ask about, because it's European-based. That's right. This is a group of birds that in some ways are kind of similar to the terror birds, but they're not terror birds. Very different to the penguins. Very different to the penguins. So they lived on land. They were big. They stopped flying and got bigger. And they lived in Europe and North America. There's one called diatrimo that lived in North America as well. And they were living around the time that mammals, modern style mammals, like horses, primates, rodents were really diversifying. Not the ancestors.

of those mammals, but the proper groups. And around the time that things like horses were starting to get bigger. And when horses got bigger, they were really taking over some of these niches, at least in North America and Europe, from Gastornis and diatrima. But the most interesting thing about those birds, they've been known for a long time. They've been known for quite a long time. And for a long time, they were thought to be ferocious top of the food chain apex ultra predators like terror birds. And it kind of makes sense when you see one. They had these big swollen heads, this corpulent body, a big hooked beak on the edge of their snout. But their heads, they're kind of, their bones are a little bit thinner. I don't know, like something felt a little

bit off. You know, many paleontologists for years were, there's a rumor mill. There's a bit of a whisper. Couldn't, you know, guest orness diatrama. Were they top predators? Did they even eat meat? Were they doing something different? And about a decade ago or so, a team of paleontologists did chemical sampling of some of the bones of these birds. And long story short, I mean, we are what we eat. And so you can actually tell something about the diet of a species or an individual based on the chemistry of the bones and the teeth, the oxygen and the carbon isotopes. A meat eater will have a different chemical fingerprint than a plant eater just because of the stuff they're eating.

And when these paleontologists did this with these birds, the chemical signal came back as a plant eater. That was a real shock to most. But some of these dissenting paleontologists were probably shaking their eyes going, I knew it. I knew something was off. So right now we actually consider these things to have probably been plant eaters. But weird plant eaters, what were they doing with such huge heads? What were they cracking giant seeds or something? We don't know.

So there's still a lot of mysteries about those birds. And they also only thrive for a short period of time. They were not around for tens and tens of millions of years, but they really had this heyday, maybe at most a few tens of millions of years. And then they were essentially replaced by some of these large mammals. We don't know if they were out-competed necessarily, but certainly replaced. So we've covered penguins, previous chat covered terrobards, and now other big birds like Gastonis and the demon ducks. But what about birds that didn't give up flight? Were there any birds in those millions of years after the extinction of the dinosaurs?

That could rival the great pterodactyls, the terracores of the dinosaur age. You might think no, because really it's hard to be big and fly, especially as a bird. Because when a bird flies, it does so by flapping its wings, actively flapping its wings. That's what generates the lift and the thrust to get airborne and to move forward through the air. The wings are powered by the muscles on the chest. When you roast a chicken and you're eating the chicken breast, those huge muscles, those are, the muscles that flap the wings. That's why they are so big, and they're anchored onto that huge breastbone, what you have to cut through when you're cutting a roast chicken. So it is hard to be

really big and have the muscles to actively flap huge wings. An airplane can be big because it has fixed wings and it has engines. But a bird is different. So you might think no. And for a long time, people thought, no, there's no way to be really big and to fly. But there have been some fossils that had been found that hint that there were some birds that, yes, were really big but still could fly. And these are these giant birds that are called pelagornithids, and some of them had wingspans of about 20 feet. And that's about double the wingspan of the albatrosses that are the biggest birds today. These birds were definitely airborne. And they had huge wings. If birds give up the ability to fly, their wings atrophy, their wings waste away. So these things were airborne.

But it seems like from the scientists who have studied them that they probably didn't actively flap their wings a lot. They probably were more of soaring birds. They would have passively glided. They would have flapped a bit, but they would have conserved energy and ridden the thermals, ridden the wind. And so in that way, they were like giant kites. And they really were similar to pteractyls. I mean, a totally different type of wing. Teradactyls had big wings made out of skin, like a giant sea.

Sal, but they probably could have been able to soar like giant kites like some pterodactyls could. And there's probably no coincidence that the first of these polygynythids turn up in the fossil record just a few million years after the asteroid when the pteractyls were wiped out. So this is a recurring theme over and over. You have terror birds filling the T-Rexenich. You have demon ducks and elephant birds filling the triceratops plant eater niche. You have the gorilla-sized penguins filling the pleasiosaurus.

Mosesaur niches and you have these polygornithes filling the terradactal niche. I'm just trying to think, are there any other dinosaur niches that died out that maybe in the future there could be bird discoveries around? But I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. I think those are the main ones. But what's most interesting to me is these polygynousids, these giant soaring birds, they went extinct about two and a half million years ago. So they had a long run. More than 60 million years they lived. and they went extinct before there were homo sapiens, before our species arrived on the scene. So we didn't do it.

It wasn't because of us. Probably it has something to do with climate changes as the Ice Ages started. Nothing in the last two and a half million years has evolved to fill that niche. So that means that giant hang glider kite teradactal niche right now is vacant. It's open. There's nothing there. So fast forward five or ten million years. Is this your prediction, Steve?

My prediction would be something will fill it. Probably some type of bird, but who knows? It could be some crazy giant insect. It could be a bat that supersizes itself. Who knows? Evolution in some ways can be predictable. There's common themes, you know, species dying, new species filling those niches. But in many ways, like human history, evolution is contingent.

If the Archduke wasn't shot that day, who knows what would have happened? If that asteroid was a near miss, who knows what would have happened? Who knows what will have happened? happen in the future. Steve, this has been absolutely brilliant. I'm glad we started with penguins and then we explored so much more. The best conversations are like this. Because, and it's a great symbol for your book.

It's a great kind of, you know, it defines it. Thank you for fun in the book. Absolutely. Yes, the story of birds. It's the story of birds. And it covers, you know, so many different species that rose and fell at the time of the dinosaurs, after the dinosaurs, and more from that. Yep.

And this was a whole lot of fun writing this book. Again, it's not an academic book. It's not a textbook. I really wrote this book to be accessible to everybody. I want this book to celebrate how awesome birds are. These are animals that broke the bonds of earth and gravity and started to fly. They evolved from dinosaurs. They are real, true, live dinosaurs,

and their history is so much more spectacular than we usually give them credit for. Steve, it just goes to me to say it. Thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show. Cheers. Thanks so much for joining us on The Ancients Today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you are loving the ancients, then why not become a history hit subscriber?

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