Re: Penguins of the North...?

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> My nice story "explains" lack of auks in the south better than lack of
> penguins in the north.  I wonder if anyone here can hazard an opinion
> about what's going on further up the coast of Patagonia, Chile,
> Argentina...and South Africa; in places where there are cold currents but
> no penguins, and presumably, no auks.

There are penguins in southern Chile and South Africa. Patagonia is the
southeastern part of Argentina and lies next to a warm current in the
Atlantic.

While I am at quoting

Alan Feduccia: The Origin and Evolution of Birds, Yale University 1996,

this says that both alcids, even flying ones, and plotopterids have never
come more southern than California and Florida, and that "penguins have
always been confined to the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere, and their
northernmost range is now represented by one species living in the Galápagos
in the cold Humboldt Current. There are no fossil finds of penguins outside
their current geographical range. Their most obvious counterparts in the
Northern Hemisphere are wing-propelled diving auks, [...]" (p. 179).