Penguins are among the most bizarre and specialized birds in the world.

Few other birds represent such a departure from what we think of as the standard avian model.

Penguins are chubby and heavy-boned. They don't fly. They don't perch in trees.

Heck, it seems like they can barely walk.

The specializations of penguins, their adaptations,

serve them very well for a life of diving deep into the ocean and of surviving in extreme cold.

The water itself may be just above freezing. And on land, some penguin species endure temperatures

as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks at a time.

To me, one of the most fascinating things about penguins is the long arc of their evolutionary history.

Their ancestors were little theropod dinosaurs back in the Cretaceous, something like miniature velociraptors.

Then those guys evolved into feathered flying creatures, but before long they started spending

a lot more time in the sea, swimming and diving. And then they lost their ability to fly and went

all in on the diving life. Those were some serious

evolutionary twists and turns. One of my favorite books is After Man, a zoology of the future.

The author, Dougal Dixon, uses the principles of evolution and ecology to speculate about what animal life on

earth could look like 50 million years from now, long after humans have gone extinct. Thus the book's

title, After Man. Evolution is highly unpredictable, of course, so the book isn't offering predictions,

just imaginative speculations

grounded firmly in science. In this future world, whales have been extinct for a long time,

but nature abhors a vacuum, and it was the penguins that ended up filling the ecological

niches left empty by whales.

Over 50 million years, these birds became more whale-like.

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