Kumimanu

The Kumimanu fossil material were found by a group of researchers from the Hampden Beach of Otago, on the South Island of New Zealand. The fossils are from the Paleocene Waipara Greensand. The fossils were studied by a New Zealand and German team, led by Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum. He was the lead author of an article on the subject published online in December 2017. The species name honours palaeontologist Ewan Fordyce. In their 2025 description and revision of fossil material from the New Zealand Waipara Greensand, Mayr et al. explained that the features used to distinguish K. fordycei from K. biceae fall within the range of variation of a single species in modern penguins and the coeval extinct genus Muriwaimanu. As such, they identified K. fordycei as a junior synonym of K. biceae, which was also supported by identical phylogenetic scorings for both species. == Description ==

Kumimanu is one of the largest known penguins. K. biceae is estimated to have reached in total length from the tip of the beak to tail, and weighed around . Kumimanu is older than all other previously found remains of penguins which reached 'giant' sizes, and thus allows scientists to better understand the evolution of penguins' size. Ksepka et al. (2023) described the second proposed species, K. fordycei as being significantly larger, with an estimated weight of . However, Mayr et al. (2025) claimed that this size falls within the range of sizes exhibited by modern penguins. == References ==