Great auk (Pen Gwyn in Welsh), or, because the great auk had such large white circles on its head. When European explorers discovered what today are known as penguins in the Southern Hemisphere, they noticed their similar appearance to the great auk and named them after this bird, although biologically, they are not closely related. Whalers also lumped the northern and southern birds together under the common name "woggins". Standing about tall and weighing approximately as adult birds, the flightless great auk was the second-largest member of both its family and the order Charadriiformes, surpassed only by the mancalline "Miomancalla". The great
Palaeognathae flying birds that were common in the Cenozoic of the northern hemisphere, were also paleognaths. He argues that the lithornithiform bird "Paleotis", known from fossils in Denmark (northern hemisphere), shared unique anatomical features of the skull that make it a member of the same order as the ostriches. He also argued that the kiwis should not have reached New Zealand, which moved away from the mainland in the Early Cretaceous, if their ancestor was flightless; this claim at least has been vindicated by the discovery of the possibly volant "Proapteryx". He therefore deduced that lithornithiform ancestors could have reached the