Penguins Got Feathers

I rather thought that they did, after all they do lay eggs, but it occurred to me I've never really paid much attention and they do rather look like seals, so I thought I'd check it out.

Yup, they do have feathers, the most densely packed of any bird, and each follicle has an individual muscle that can puff the feather out on land creating an insulating blanket of entrapped air; or each feather can be pulled down tightly to the body, creating an interlocking and water proof sheeting for swimming and diving. Pretty interesting appurtenances, these feathers.

And I learned that the penguin is a very old bird, at least 50 million years old, and very much then as they are now. That's about when birds first took to the sky...but as far as I know, no fossil of a "pre-peguin" has ever been found that could fly.

A penguin is a bird that never flew.

This is very interesting. It suggests feathers appeared initially, not for flight, but for insulation, a sort of funny fur. That means that penguins are mammals, because only mammals are warm blooded and only a warm blooded animal could profit from insulation. And it also means that feathers didn't happen because of flight, but flight happened because of feathers.

This may not be the tightest logic but it is interesting. It would fit with feathered dinosaurs that couldn't fly... But that would then mean that dinosaurs were warm blooded...at least the subset that developed feathers.

Pretty interesting. It means either that early birds were mammals, because they were warm blooded and thus could profit from insulating feathers; or that dinosaurs, some at least, having feathers, were warm blooded. So were all dinosaurs warm blooded, or were there two distinct lines of dinosaurs, or can the warm blooded develop from the cold blooded?

Speculations, speculations... And it occurs to me I don't know what the speculation is as to where warm blooded placental mammals came from in the first place, except that, right at the start, they were... v e r y s m a l l. Very small seems to explain origins. But then my own mice are very small, and they're darn near as complex as humans. Maybe mammals are actually warm blooded dinosaurs, they just don't lay eggs... Maybe we're all dinosaurs... I admit I'm not informed as to all of these speculations.





One other interesting thing: The Rat Squirrel (Diatomyidae), thought extinct for eleven million years, was recently found, well, not alive, but as a corpse in a meat market in Laos, meaning of course that it had died more recently than even a million years ago. It was initially classified as a new species, Laonastes aenigmamus, but following a search of the fossil record (by a second group of researchers) it was reclassified as the long extinct Diatomyidae.

Eleven million years dead and now up and kicking. That is pretty impressive, but this is the part of the article I want to quote:

Diatomyidae were squirrel-sized rodents that lived during the middle Tertiary period, 34 million to 11 million years ago, in southern Asia, central China and Japan. They also had highly characteristic molar teeth and jaw structure, which is how the researchers reclassified Laonastes.

A recently discovered fossil of Laonastes matched the "living" specimen in skull shape and overall size. The only difference is that the "living" specimen's teeth are slightly more pointed.

"It looks like possibly one of the things that's been changing in the family is improved cutting of vegetation," Dawson told LiveScience. "But over 11 million years, you'd expect some differences in the structures."

The emphasis is mine. In eleven million years the teeth got pointy. How exciting is this to those who believe that man as an evolving creature will at some time in a meaningful future be able directly to apprehend God?