The giant penguin is a creature allegedly seen in

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

during the 1940s, and is at least partly documented to have been a hoax. This legend has no scientific merit, despite there having been giant penguins which became extinct millions of years ago.

History

In 1948, several people reported finding large, three-toed animal tracks at

Clearwater Beach Clearwater Beach includes a resort area and a residential area on a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico in Pinellas County on the west-central coast of Florida. Located just west over the Intracoastal Waterway by way of the Clearwater Memorial Ca ...

in Florida. Later, more tracks were found along the shore of

Suwannee River The Suwannee River (also spelled Suwanee River) is a river that runs through south Georgia southward into Florida in the southern United States. It is a wild blackwater river, about long.U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset hig ...

, from the ocean. Later that year a giant penguin was allegedly sighted at distance. The huge bird was described as tall, and having

alligator An alligator is a large reptile in the Crocodilia order in the genus ''Alligator'' of the family Alligatoridae. The two extant species are the American alligator (''A. mississippiensis'') and the Chinese alligator (''A. sinensis''). Additiona ...

-like feet. During this same period, people in a boat off the Florida

gulf coast The Gulf Coast of the United States, also known as the Gulf South, is the coastline along the Southern United States where they meet the Gulf of Mexico. The coastal states that have a shoreline on the Gulf of Mexico are Texas, Louisiana, Mississ ...

reported seeing an extremely large penguin-like bird floating on the water. These incidents were reported in several newspapers. Later that year, another huge, penguin-like bird was allegedly seen from an airplane on the banks of the

in northern Florida. Cryptozoologist

Ivan T. Sanderson Ivan Terence Sanderson (January 30, 1911 – February 19, 1973) was a British biologist and writer born in Edinburgh, Scotland, who became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Along with Belgian-French biologist Bernard Heuvelmans, San ...

declared that the creature was a giant penguin that had somehow been driven away from its natural habitat. On April 11, 1988, ''

St. Petersburg Times The ''Tampa Bay Times'', previously named the ''St. Petersburg Times'' until 2011, is an American newspaper published in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. It has won fourteen Pulitzer Prizes since 1964, and in 2009, won two in a single ...

'' reporter Jan Kirby revealed that the penguin hoax had been perpetrated by Tony Signorini and Al Williams, a locally known prankster who died in 1969. Signorini stated they had been inspired by a photograph of

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

ized dinosaur tracks, and showed the reporter the huge penguin feet made of

iron Iron () is a chemical element with symbol Fe (from la, ferrum) and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, right in f ...

used in creating the tracks.

Extinct giant penguins

There were numerous prehistoric

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...

of gigantic penguins (such as '' Pachydyptes ponderosus'' and ''

Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi ''Anthropornis'' is a genus of giant penguin that lived 45-33 million years ago, during the Late Eocene and the earliest part of the Oligocene.Myrcha, A., Jadwiszczak, P., Tambussi, C.P., Noriega, J.I., Gazdzicki, A., Tatur, A., and Valle, R.A ...

''; see also

Palaeeudyptinae Palaeeudyptinae, the giant penguins, is a paraphyletic subfamily of prehistoric penguins. It includes several genera of medium-sized to very large species, such as ''Icadyptes salasi'', '' Palaeeudyptes marplesi'', ''Anthropornis nordenskjoeldi'', ...

). However, actual prehistoric

megafauna In terrestrial zoology, the megafauna (from Greek μέγας ''megas'' "large" and New Latin ''fauna'' "animal life") comprises the large or giant animals of an area, habitat, or geological period, extinct and/or extant. The most common threshold ...

l birds only occurred in South Pacific and

Cape Horn Cape Horn ( es, Cabo de Hornos, ) is the southernmost headland of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago of southern Chile, and is located on the small Hornos Island. Although not the most southerly point of South America (which are the Diego Ramírez ...

ocean waters. This is known from fossil remains. All such lineages certainly became extinct some 37 to 60 million years ago at latest: so they were never encountered alive by humans and were barely contemporaries of the earliest hominids.

In literature

Giant penguins based on the fossil finds also appear in

Jules Verne Jules Gabriel Verne (;''Longman Pronunciation Dictionary''. ; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the ''Voyages extraor ...

's novel ''

Journey to the Center of the Earth ''Journey to the Center of the Earth'' (french: Voyage au centre de la Terre), also translated with the variant titles ''A Journey to the Centre of the Earth'' and ''A Journey into the Interior of the Earth'', is a classic science fiction novel ...

'', and in ''

At the Mountains of Madness ''At the Mountains of Madness'' is a science fiction-horror novella by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931 and rejected that year by ''Weird Tales'' editor Farnsworth Wright on the grounds of its length. It was ori ...

'' by H. P. Lovecraft. In the latter case, they are found in a fictitious

Antarctic The Antarctic ( or , American English also or ; commonly ) is a polar region around Earth's South Pole, opposite the Arctic region around the North Pole. The Antarctic comprises the continent of Antarctica, the Kerguelen Plateau and other ...

underground setting and their presence is given a comparatively plausible evolutionary explanation.

References

{{cite book , last=Eberhart , first=G.M. , title=Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology , publisher=ABC-CLIO , series=Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology , year=2002 , isbn=978-1-57607-283-7 , url=https://books.google.com/books?id=z9gMsCUtCZUC&pg=PA543 , access-date=2020-05-08 , page=543 Legendary birds Hoaxes in the United States 1940s hoaxes 1940s in Florida