Penguin Penguin Penguins (order Sphenisciformes, family Spheniscidae) are a group of aquatic, flightless birds. They live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere, with only one species, the Galapagos penguin, found north of the equator. Highly adapted for life in the water, penguins have countershaded dark and white plumage, and their wings have evolved into flippers. Most penguins feed on krill, fish, squid and other forms of sea life which they catch while swimming underwater. They spend roughly half of their lives on land and the other half in the sea. Although almost all penguin species are native to the Southern Hemisphere,
Origin of birds was the sister clade to the Deinonychosauria, but that the more advanced bird "Confuciusornis" was within the Dromaeosauridae. This result supports Paul's hypothesis, suggesting that the Deinonychosauria and the Troodontidae are part of Aves, the bird lineage proper, and secondarily flightless. This paper, however, excluded all other birds and thus did not sample their character distributions. The paper was criticized by Corfe and Butler (2006) who found the authors could not support their conclusions statistically. Mayr "et al." agreed that the statistical support was weak, but added that it is also weak for the alternative scenarios. Current cladistic analyses do