10/1/2004: Newly-hatched penguin
 

http://cellar.org/2004/newpenguin.jpg

Born without its tuxedo, a newly hatched king penguin is nursed by zookeeper Mette Larsen of Denmark's Odense Zoo. The baby was placed in an incubator borrowed from the maternity ward of the local university hospital.

that sure looks like it came from the Aliens movie to me.... :eek:

thought most baby animals were cute so their parents won't kill them...

That is NOT what I expected a baby penguin to look like! He really does have an "alien" look to him. Oh well, they sure are cute when they grow up--hopefully it won't take this little guy long to grow out of the funny-looking stage....

Wow that thing's ugly as sin, but just think of the smooth, smart, sharp tuxedo he'll grow into! Just give him some time. :thumbsup:

Jurassic Park? :eyebrow:

Damn. Now that IS ugly! A few facts about these creatures: Prehistoric penguins stood 6 feet tall & weighed about 200 lbs. They could fly as well as any other sea bird. Now they swim at speeds in excess of 25 mph. They can leap up to 6 feet out of the water onto shore. They bite savagely when threatened. A near opposite of humans in this respect: In the Emporer genera ( Aptenodytes forsteri ), The female lays ome egg, then leaves to feed. The male incubates the egg by himself at temperatures as cold as -40 degrees F. By the time the egg has hatched he has lost a third of his body weight. Only after the chick is hatched & stable does the female return. Then Papa Penguin can rest and eat. That's all I got to say about that.......

I find it almost impossible to believe that a bird 6 ft tall, weighing 200 lbs, would be able to get airborne, much less 'fly as well as any sea bird'. Do you have a reference to back that up?

Sure do. Excerpted from Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia Copyright(c) 1994, 1995 Compton's Newmedia, Inc. My other cpu has this program living in it. It's a fountain of "useless information". Bear in mind: there were other airborne dinos much larger. Hard to imagine.........the key word here is prehistoric.

I have to say that despite you providing an official-enough source, I still can't believe it. Look at the physics of it. You know how much power is required to lift a 200 pound body? Considering most of that power would be supplied by the air, it would need enormous wings (with enormous muscles and bones to hold them), and a high enough airspeed to prevent 'stalling' (i.e., falling) - pilots know what I'm talking about.

An albatross weighs only 25 lbs (yeah, only), and it constantly cruises on the wing. I wasn't able to discover how fast they go when they're cruising. One clue however is that (according to
this encyclopedia ) "In the days of sail it often accompanied a ship for days, not merely following it, but wheeling in wide circles around it..." If it needed to maintain a high airspeed, it would have to wheel around in wide circles if it wanted to follow the ship for whatever reason.

A 25lb albatross is about 4 ft long, with a wingspan of 11.5 ft (ibid). To scale a hypothetical bird to be as heavy as 200 lbs, the body length would double to 8ft (close enough to 6ft tall), but the wingspan would also double to 23 ft long. Even if we're overshooting that a lot, you'd think they would mention in the encyclopedia article that a flying penguin that large had an enormous wingspan of, say, almost 20 ft long. You'd think those would be the easy bones to find, right? Is it me - am I the only one who hasn't heard about pre-historic penguins with the massive wings?

Also, you know the saying, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall"? It's hard to imagine how a 200lb bird could land without hurting itself due to the high airspeed the bird would *have* to achieve, even while landing. The article above describes albatross landings as "semi-controlled crashes"... and they're only 25 pounds. Finally, there's a reason turkeys and ostriches and large penguins don't fly. It's because flight doesn't scale well.

Anyway, here's a test: does the encyclopedia article mention the massive wings on these prehistoric penguins? If it doesn't, I gotta call bullshit on either you or the encyclopedia.

Uh, turkeys do fly, albeit not the most graceful of flying birds but they do in fact fly.

Is there anything in that Encyc. that says whether or not the bones of the prehistoric penguin were hollow or not? Or what kind of area they may have lived in?

I know today's penguins have solid bones, but if they figured the thing flew, then its bones would have been either really slender or hollow and full of air pockets, like terrestrial birds' bones. If it did have slender or hollow bones, then most of that 200lbs would have been muscle and with that much muscle, most of it likely in the torso and chest, flight may have been possible. Maybe it couldn't lift off like a sparrow can, but had to take a running start like an albatross or prefered to dive off a cliff like other birds that tend to live near cliffs. With that kind of body, I don't see why it couldn't fly in a controlled glide like a seagull using seawind and thermals to keep aloft.

As far as wingspan goes, how does it compare to the wingspan of a typical hangglider to keep a solidboned 150-200 pound human plus equipment aloft and in control?

If the prehistoric penguins did live around cliffs, then landings would have been pretty easy. Ever see a bird curve in an upward motion during flight to light on the edge of a roof or tree branch. A bird that size could use the lift that comes from an ocean breeze to light perfectly on the edge of a cliff without needing a runway and just waddle off to wherever it needed to be. Of course, this assumes they lived in the similar areas as they do now and had cliffs to use.

I'd figure if a critter evolved into the role, then it would be well suited to so controlled crash-landings that much weight, maybe extra skin and fat padding on the belly and chest for cushioning, stronger legs perhaps, better control over its wings than we're giving it credit for...who knows.

Here's a link with more details about prehistoric penguins. This site says up to 300 pounds. It doesn't really appear to touch on whether or not they might have flown. I did find a couple of pages that said that the penguins of old lost their ability to fly around 100 million years ago when climates changed but neither site looked 'official'. I could still post them for the curious.

I didn't find any info about bone density. I do know that they evolved in the Eocene era. They also are not confined to icy regions, but they all live near water. You can find them now in areas near the equator and on the Gallapogas Islands.(spelling?) I wish I knew more about aerodynamics. Kinda like a mix between science and nature. I've seen lots of things fly that made me wonder- "how'd they do that?" Ex: box kites & bumblebees. Maybe I shouldn't have posted that but I think the penguin dilemma is near exhaustion......................

The experts are telling us that dinosaurs evolved into Robins. Why couldn't a flying prehistoric critter evolve into penguins.? :confused:

Assuming evolution is still in progress, the penguins are learning to swim faster and jump farther all the time. Do they pass penguin lore down from generation to generation via a surprisingly comprehensive means of communication, such as a complex combination of belches and tap dancing, about grandpaw Opus who flew too close to the sun and got his wings melted?

that's nothing compared to the prehistoric snowman. Over 30 feet tall, and it's hat was magic. Your little penguin doesn't seem so impressive now, does it?

don;t make me break out the Triassic Octopi.

Yeah, but could it open a jar?

Either that is the greatest flying turkey picture of all time, or someone stuck a mounted bird outside on a tree to take the shot. It looks like the label on a bottle of Wild Turkey.

Albatrosses and turkeys both do much more gliding than actual flying. They *can* get airborne from the ground, but they don't like it much. They both take a long, clumsy run to get it accomplished, and neither can really ascend from a standing start by simply flapping their wings, unless they've got a brisk headwind. Albatrosses in particular prefer cliffs where the wind takes an upward course, so they can simply spread their wings and get lifted off of the ground by it.

I once saw a turkey fly over eight lanes of interstate plus the median strip in rush hour traffic at an altitude of about 18-wheeler windshield feet (it was already airborne when I saw it). It flapped its wings about three times across that distance. The landing probably would have been pretty impressive, though, as it was going to occur in a heavily wooded, steeply downsloping piece of terrain.

No, it couldn't. And for the same reason that octopi can't fly.

Somebody TOTALLY nailed a fake turkey to a tree and took a pic.

Okay, I did a quick google search for 'flying turkey' and that was one of the first pictures I saw that looked good enough to post to make my point. I admit I didn't check it out closely at the time. And you're right, it does look kinda hokey now that I'm looking at it again. :o

Just wondering, should it be "aerial" birds'? A roadrunner or ostrich, or the late kiwi maybe I'd vote for being terrestrial, but the rest of them? I'm not too sure... ;)

OK
As a perfessional photogiraffer, I'd stake both your reputations on the veracity of the turkey pic. All flash pictures look fake. especially that one. That one looks especially fake. but it looks so fake that I think it may be real. Then again, it may be frozen. The odd thing is that the head and neck get all red when the bird is excited (my friend had a pet turkey and we'd watch its head go from normal blue to excited red) I doubt it would stay red and excited after the bird was nailed to a tree. Unless of course it was one of "those" kinds of birds, if you get my drift.

Also, we used to live in a place where the turkeys would walk past, and on, our back porch every damn day. 20-30 of them, all ages. Sometimes I'd open the door and startle them. They'd fly helter skelter up into the trees with as much grace as a bulldozer. They'd snap the branches they flew into, bashing anything in their way.

Not twigs, BRANCHES. They are brutes.

A friend of mine worked in a butcher shop during the depression when he was a kid and he told me about the time he had to slaughter a live turkey. He cut off its head and it got away from him IN THE SHOP! The bird flew around for several seconds (must have seemed like a day and a half) covering everyone in the store in blood.

It was the depression, I guess that kind of thing happened w/o lawsuits then.

They fly when they want to.

Foot, good story about the butcher shop! I like your writing style too. Just to clear up the veracity of the turkey picture in question I redid the google search and found the same picture. Low and behold it came from a taxidermy website that had this picture right next to it. This one clearly shows that it is in fact a 'stuffed' turkey nailed to a tree!

Good eye, Bri! :eyeball:

*and we now return you to our regularly scheduled thread topic...

I actually borrowed that term from one of the sites I visited. :) It was used to describe birds that tend to live over/on land and don't have a need to be able to dive, hunt and generally travel via water. So by that token I guess the ostrich would be as terrestrial as the eagle.

I suspected the turkey was stuffed. And now that I look closely at the pic, you can see the board it is mounted to actually nailed to the tree...

Found a live one on turkeys...

[quote=404Error]
Good eye, Bri! :eyeball:[quote]

Of course I have a good eye! i love your pictures (and, you know I do!) Esp. the froggy-bottom ones.

55-60 mph? Criminey...these aren't birds, they're frigging ballistic missiles!

I've seen turkeys go faster than that. Georgia turkeys of course. At my mom's dinner table around the end of November. Lubricated with cranberry sauce. NOT the gelled type. They seem to lose velocity with that kind........... ;) ;)

Thanks 404,
I just need to add this (monty python):

...Owner: The Norwegian Blue prefers kippin' on it's back! Remarkable bird, innit, squire? Lovely plumage!

**** Mr. Praline: Look, I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.

**** (pause)

**** Owner: Well, o'course it was nailed there! If I hadn't nailed that bird down, it would have nuzzled up to those bars, bent 'em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!

**** Mr. Praline: "VOOM"?!? Mate, this bird wouldn't "voom" if you put four million volts through it! 'E's bleedin' demised! ...etc.

So, I guess not just Norwegian Blues need to be nailed down.

I lobbied to have one of my bands of the past named 'Nailed to the Perch', but everyone was afraid that no one would get it...

My primary musical associate, who also liked the idea, decided instead to write a song in honor of that skit, though. If I wasn't lazy, I'd type it out.

Turkeys can fly. Once years ago I was in woods squrrel hunting about daylight, w/hangover. A damn turkey flew down from roost & scared the hell out of me, well almost. But if on ground they perfer to run. IMHA