In a puzzling discovery, a researcher from North Carolina State University along with U.S., Peruvian and Argentine collaborators has shown that two undiscovered penguins species reached equatorial regions tens of millions of years earlier than expected.

The penguins’ sites were discovered by Peruvian scientists in 2005 and Paleontologist Dr. Julia Clarke assistant professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences at NC State has studied the species.

According to her findings, the first of the new species, Icadyptes salasi, stood 5 feet tall and lived about 36 million years ago and the second one, called Perudyptes devriesi, lived about 42 million years ago.

“We tend to think of penguins as being cold-adapted species,” Clarke says, “even the small penguins in equatorial regions today, but the new fossils date back to one of the warmest periods in the last 65 million years of Earth’s history. The evidence indicates that penguins reached low latitude regions more than 30 million years prior to our previous estimates.”

Clarke estimates that the two Peruvian species are the product of two separate dispersal events. The ancestors of Perudyptes appear to have inhabited Antarctica, while those of Icadyptes may have originated near New Zealand.

“These Peruvian species are early branches off the penguin family tree, that are comparatively distant cousins of living penguins,” Clarke says. “In addition, current global warming is occurring on a significantly shorter timescale. The data from these new fossil species cannot be used to argue that warming wouldn’t negatively impact living penguins.”

Clarke’s report was published in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.