62 Wonderful Facts About Penguins | Legacy Facts

# The name penguin derives from the Welsh words 'pen,' which means head and 'gwyn,' meaning white.

# Some species of prehistoric penguins attained massive sizes, becoming as tall or as heavy as an adult human.

# The oldest known fossil penguin species is Waimanu Manneringi, which lived in the early Paleocene epoch of New Zealand, around 62 million years ago.

# A group of penguins on land is called a "waddle." A group of penguins in the water is called a "raft." A group of young penguin chicks is called a "crèche."

# Penguins do not live in the Arctic.

# Only two species live on the frozen land of Antarctica, the Adélie (Pygoscelis adeliae), and the Emperor Penguins. The majority of penguins live farther north, either in New Zealand or along the coast of South America.

# The most northerly penguins live in the Galapagos Islands.

# The number of known species of penguins is debated but thought to be between 17 and 20.

# The largest living species of Penguins is the Emperor Penguin. They are around 1.1 m or 3.7 feet tall and weighs about 35 kg or 77 lb.

# Little Penguins (a.k.a. Blue or Fairy) (Eudyptula minor) are the smallest of all the penguins. They are around 16 inches tall and weigh only two pounds. They live around Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand in the warmer waters.

# Due to its donkey-like braying sounds, the African penguin is also known as the Jackass penguin.

# 1 in 50,000 penguins are born with brown plumage rather than black.

# Penguins are not usually sexually dimorphic, which means that both male and female penguins look alike.

# Penguins spend about half of their lives on land and the other half in the oceans.

# The eyes of penguins work better underwater than in air. Most scientists claim that on land, the penguins are extremely short-sighted.

# Penguins have a special organ close to the eye which filters salt from the water out of their system.

# The normal body temperature of a penguin is around 100°F or 38°C.

# Penguins have no teeth. Instead, they have fleshy spines facing backward that line the inside of their mouth.

# Penguins consume snow as a source of fresh-water.

# Penguins can not taste sweet or savory flavors, they can only taste sour and salty flavors.

# Penguins are carnivores and they find all their food in the sea. They eat mostly fish and squid. They also consume crustaceans like crabs, shrimp, and krill. In one dive a large penguin can gather up to 30 fish. Penguins (and any animal) that only eat fish are known as piscivorous.

# Penguins swallow stones and pebbles along with their food. Scientists believe that the stones might help grind up their food and digest it. The stones might also add sufficient extra weight to help penguins dive deeper.

# Penguins can control their blood flow to their extremities, reducing the amount of blood that gets cold but still keeping the extremities from freezing.

# Penguins have more feathers, averaging about 70 feathers per square inch, than most other birds. Emperor Penguin has most feathers of any bird, about 100 feathers a square inch.

# Penguins replace their old feathers with new ones once a year.

# Penguin's wings have evolved into flippers which allows them to swim underwater with incredible speed.

# Penguins often slide on their tummies over ice and snow. This is known as tobogganing. Researchers think they're doing that for fun and as an efficient way to travel.

# Penguins can jump up to 6 feet (1.8 m) out of the water.

# Penguins are able to stay underwater for 10-15 minutes before coming to the surface to breathe. Penguins can't breathe underwater.

# Most of the penguins swim at a speed of four to seven miles per hour underwater.

# The Gentoo Penguin is the fastest underwater swimming bird, capable of swimming up to 36 km/h (22 mph).

# The legs of penguins are longer than they seem and they do have knees.

# Penguins are able to walk between 1.7 mph (2.7 km/h) and 2.4 mph (3.8 km/h).

# Penguin nesting areas are referred to as "rookeries," and can contain thousands of bird pairs. Each penguin has a distinct call that helps individual penguins even in the largest groups to find their mates and chicks.

# King penguins can form colonies with a nesting capacity of up to 10,000 penguins. Each penguin maintains an exact but close distance to their neighbors.

# While most of the penguins are monogamous, they spend the majority of their year apart.

# Many penguin species gift mates with rocks.

# After solo journeys totaling 200,000 miles, Magellanic penguins always return to the same mate.

# Most species of penguins breed during the summer and spring. The incubation of eggs ranges between 1 month and 67 days depending on the species. Emperor Penguin is the only penguin to breed during winter in the Antarctic.

# Penguins usually lay only one brood. The exception is the little penguin that in a season can raise 2 or 3 broods.

# The Emperor Penguin breeds in the coldest environment of all the penguin and bird species. Air temperatures can reach -40°F (-40°C), and wind speeds can reach 144 km/h (89 mph).

# When penguin moms lose a chick, they sometimes try to "steal" the chick of another mother.

# The lifespan of a wild penguin is around 15 to 20 years, spending around 75 percent of their lives in the water.

# Emperor Penguin can dive to depths of more than 500 m and can stay up to 27 minutes underwater.

# Roles are reversed on Emperor Penguin: while she goes out to feed, the male incubates the egg.

# The Emperor Penguins have the longest uninterrupted incubation time of any bird at 64-67 days.

# The name Magellanic Penguin comes from Ferdinand Magellan, who first saw them in 1520. Every year, around 20,000 adults and 22,000 juvenile Magellanic Penguins are killed off the coast of Argentina by oil spills.

# The longest-fasting bird is an adult male emperor penguin. During the incubation/hatching period of his chick, he will not eat for about 115 days.

# The Macaroni Penguin is the penguin with the highest number of species, with roughly 11,654,000 pairs.

# The world's rarest penguin is the Yellow-eyed Penguin, with just around 5,000 inhabiting the wild. They live along New Zealand's southeastern coast and nearby islands.

# To discover that in the afternoon, penguins sleep more deeply, scientists crept on sleeping penguins at different times of the day and poked them with a stick until they woke up.

# Over the past 20 years, the Erect-crested Penguin has lost about 70 percent of its population. The Galapagos Penguin has lost more than 50 percent of its population since the 1970s, with a 30 percent chance of extinction this century. Pollution, loss of habitat by human encroachment, commercial fishing, oil dumping, algae blooms, and global warming are the most common threats to all penguin survival.

# Three men captured and tied up the last Great Auk (the extinct Northern Hemisphere penguin) seen in the UK. The men kept the bird alive until a large storm struck the area. They thought the bird was a witch, and they killed it.

# There's a voluntary daily penguin parade at the Edinburgh Zoo, which sometimes gets canceled if the penguins don't want to go out that day.

# Every year, Penguins have two days dedicated to them: January 20th is Penguin Awareness Day, and April 25th is World Penguin Day.

# Snipers were deployed to protect a colony of little penguins from predators in Australia in 2009.

# There is an island off Australia's coast where trained Maremma sheepdog protects a colony of penguins from wild foxes; the first used dog prevented the colony from being wiped out.

# In Japan, there is a penguin named LaLa that has its own air-conditioned room, wears a backpack and walks freely to the fish market.

# Norway knighted a penguin in 2008.

# Three men set out from Antarctica to recover Emperor Penguin eggs in 1912. It was so cold one man’s teeth chattered so violently that they shattered. The National History Museum refused to accept the eggs once they returned to the UK.

# Eating penguins is illegal for U.S. citizens.

# Scientists can locate Penguin colonies from space simply by searching for dark ice patches of penguin poop.

If you are interested then check out our "Facts About Sharks"

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