From left: Aptenodytes forsteri (Emperor penguin), Inkayacu paracasensis, and Eudyptula minor (Little penguin)

Nothing is black-and-white, it seems. Not even penguins. That’s what University of Texas paleontologist Julia Clarke found after unearthing 36-million- year-old remains in Peru’s Paracas National Reserve—the first penguin fossil ever found with evidence of feathers intact. Like its present-day relatives, Inkayacu paracasensis was a deft swimmer. Unlike them, it weighed more than a hundred pounds and sported a coat with ruddy feathers. Clarke’s team deduced the color last year after comparing tiny pigment packages called melanosomes from the fossilized plumage with those of living species. This part of coastal Peru has recently produced other big penguin finds. Clarke says the area could be key to painting the full picture of the birds’ evolution. For now, a touch of color has been applied. —Catherine Zuckerman

Art: Mauricio Antón. Photo: Julia Clarke, University of Texas at Austin. NGM Maps

Comparison of a woolly mammoth (left) and Asian elephant (right); by Kazuhiko Sano

Can you picture a live woolly mammoth hanging out with a herd of elephants? It could happen. An international project is underway to clone a woolly mammoth using frozen mammoth DNA and in vitro fertilization, with an African elephant as the surrogate mother. Read about an original baby mammoth, Lyuba, the 40,000-year-old frozen star of a National Geographic article, and a companion article discussing the complexities and ethics of cloning extinct species.

• Video and more online mammoth features from the NatGeo Channel.
• 2009 May—National Geographic magazine. Ice Baby: Secrets of a Frozen Mammoth. 30-51. Just a month old when she died, Lyuba was preserved almost perfectly, down to her eyelashes. Tom Mueller reports on the likely explanation behind her untimely death and what she can tell us about her vanished species. Photos by Francis Latreille.
• 2009 May—National Geographic magazine. Recipe for a Resurrection: Should We Clone Extinct Animals? 52-55. Tom Mueller discusses the challenges involved in sequencing mammoth DNA and the ethics of producing a one-of-a-kind creature: because we can, should we? An interactive feature illustrates how mammoth cloning would work.

Every batter and tennis pro knows the best thwack comes when the ball hits the equipment’s sweet spot. Turns out glyptodonts, giant armored mammals that lived from about 30 million to 10,000 years ago, were using that center of percussion, as the spot is known, to strike hard blows with their battle-ready tails.

Fossil evidence tells us that some of the largest of these armadillo kin wielded spiked clubs weighing up to 140 pounds, joined to the body by a series of bony rings. Now biomechanical studies by Uruguayan scientist R. Ernesto Blanco and colleagues suggest that glyptodont fights didn’t involve random swinging of arms. While smaller species had mobile tails for quick swipes at predators like carnivorous birds, the largest ones had stiffer tails with a sweet spot at or near their prime spike. This morphology allowed the beasts to nail foes while minimizing harmful vibrations to the body joint from the force of impact. The big guys could afford this adaptation, which limited the tail’s speed and range of motion but, Blanco theorizes, offered a particular advantage during slow, ritualized courtship battles over favored females. How sweet is that? —Jennifer S. Holland

Lee Berger brought attention back to South Africa's amazing record of human fossils after the end of Apartheid. Here he examines a bone fragment in a cave in the islands of Palau in the Pacific Ocean. Despite that project's unhappy ending, Berger remains one of the most active and enthusiastic paleoanthropologists. Photo by author.

This week's announcement of a new species of human ancestor from South Africa will start another round of debates in paleoanthropology. Whether the fossils named Australopithecus sediba represent a new species and whether they have been assigned to the right group will be questioned, as well as whether or not they have anything to do with the human lineage that led to us. This week's announcement will also be another chance for Lee Berger, an American paleoanthropologist whose career has been marked by what to many other scientists would have been knock-out blows from the media and his peers.

It was mostly mouth and belly, this amphibious beast from about 65 million years ago. Thick-skulled, ten-pound Beelzebufo ampinga (“armored frog from hell”) was one of the most massive frogs ever; today’s biggest is the seven-pound Conraua goliath. The ambush predator lived on Madagascar, where David Krause of Stony Brook University and his team began finding bone bits in 1993. Susan Evans of University College London and others shaped 15 years’ worth of fossils (72 fragments in all) into frog form. “When we scaled the bones against modern skulls, we saw just how big this thing could get,” Evans says. “It was a monster.” Many geologists believe Madagascar became geographically isolated some 88 million years ago, but Beelzebufo’s closest living kin are in South America. One theory is that the two landmasses remained linked via Antarctica longer than was thought.