Anthropornis grandis, and now I feel awkward

Calm yourself. I promise this is rated G and very much safe for work.

Odds are you have only heard of anthropornis if you’ve read Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, in which case you should check out the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast. If you have no idea who/what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it.

Today’s largest penguin is a piddly 3-foot tall emperor penguin. While this is a totally decent size for swimming around, catching tasty fish, and raising adorable poof ball babies, it does nothing to impress me.

But 40,000,000 years ago (yeah, I could write “40 million,” but I like seeing all the zeroes), there was a species of penguin that was about 6 feet tall.

To put this in real life terms, these penguins were the size of a Tom Hanks.

Or just barely taller than two Verne Troyers.

Their human-sized stature is why the scientist who discovered them put “anthro” in the species name; “anthro” means human. “Pornis” supposedly means penguin, but that’s no excuse.

These Antarctic creatures were either the cutest giant penguins imaginable,

or they were the penguins that nightmares are made of.

From the fossils we’ve found, we can only know their size, not their place on the cuteness scale.

But cute or not, giant penguins are still awesome. They serve as a reminder that evolution is neither linear, nor perfect. Much tinkering has gone on for millennia for this process to result in the organisms we see today. Turns out there is some reason 3′ penguins fare better than 6′ ones. Why exactly, we can only guess. Perhaps they couldn’t find enough food to nourish their huge body, or maybe they died in a thousand-year penguin war. I’ll leave this to the experts.