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‘Adopt a Penguin Egg’ Easter Campaign Helps Endangered African Birds

A penguin carer feeds a chick at South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds rehabilitation center, where the center has been incubating over 200 eggs of the endangered African penguin that were rescued from two penguin colonies, since the start of the year and they are soliciting donations by inviting people to "adopt an egg", in Cape Town, South Africa, March 27, 2024. (Reuters)
A penguin carer feeds a chick at South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds rehabilitation center, where the center has been incubating over 200 eggs of the endangered African penguin that were rescued from two penguin colonies, since the start of the year and they are soliciting donations by inviting people to "adopt an egg", in Cape Town, South Africa, March 27, 2024. (Reuters)
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‘Adopt a Penguin Egg’ Easter Campaign Helps Endangered African Birds

A penguin carer feeds a chick at South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds rehabilitation center, where the center has been incubating over 200 eggs of the endangered African penguin that were rescued from two penguin colonies, since the start of the year and they are soliciting donations by inviting people to "adopt an egg", in Cape Town, South Africa, March 27, 2024. (Reuters)
A penguin carer feeds a chick at South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds rehabilitation center, where the center has been incubating over 200 eggs of the endangered African penguin that were rescued from two penguin colonies, since the start of the year and they are soliciting donations by inviting people to "adopt an egg", in Cape Town, South Africa, March 27, 2024. (Reuters)

Bored of buying eggs made of chocolate and wrapped in foil with predictable bunny motifs? This Easter in South Africa you could instead spend your cash an egg that will hatch a live penguin.

But these ones are not for taking home.

Since the start of the year, a South African conservation group has been incubating over 200 eggs of the endangered African penguin that were previously rescued from two colonies.

The Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) is soliciting donations to meet the cost of incubating them by inviting people to "adopt an egg."

The African penguin -- the only species that breeds on the continent, and which is also found in Namibia -- was once South Africa's most abundant seabird.

No longer. The population has plunged to less than 10,000 breeding pairs in 2024, according to SANCCOB resources manager, Ronnis Daniels, meaning there is only 1% left of the 1 million that were in existence a century earlier.

"At the current trajectory, which is an 8% loss every year, we are looking at extinction by 2035," she told Reuters. "There won't be enough (for) the wild population to save itself."

Threats to the birds are legion, but the main culprit is commercial fishing, which has ravaged stocks of sardines and anchovies that the penguins depend on to live.

"That would be the top of the list," Daniels said. "The sad part is that fish is exported mostly as fishmeal."

Other threats include all the noise and pollution from the shipping routes around South Africa, especially when the ships stop to refuel in Algoa bay, she said.

On one day, volunteer Nicky Shadbolt was walking along an enclosure for the downy baby penguins.

"Over this time, when everybody is also thinking about chocolates and fluffy bunnies, we would like you ... to adopt a penguin egg," she said, punctuated by baby penguin squeaks.

"It is really expensive for us to raise that little penguin from egg or all the way to maturity," she added, a process that takes four months until they are released back into the wild.

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New T-Rex Ancestor Discovered in Drawers of Mongolian Institute

A life reconstruction of the newly identified dinosaur species Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, which lived 86 million years ago in Mongolia, is seen in this handout illustration released on June 11, 2025. (Julius Csotonyi/Handout via Reuters)
A life reconstruction of the newly identified dinosaur species Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, which lived 86 million years ago in Mongolia, is seen in this handout illustration released on June 11, 2025. (Julius Csotonyi/Handout via Reuters)
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New T-Rex Ancestor Discovered in Drawers of Mongolian Institute

A life reconstruction of the newly identified dinosaur species Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, which lived 86 million years ago in Mongolia, is seen in this handout illustration released on June 11, 2025. (Julius Csotonyi/Handout via Reuters)
A life reconstruction of the newly identified dinosaur species Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, which lived 86 million years ago in Mongolia, is seen in this handout illustration released on June 11, 2025. (Julius Csotonyi/Handout via Reuters)

Misidentified bones that languished in the drawers of a Mongolian institute for 50 years belong to a new species of tyrannosaur that rewrites the family history of the mighty T-Rex, scientists said Wednesday.

This slender ancestor of the massive Tyrannosaurus Rex was around four meters (13 feet) long and weighed three quarters of a ton, according to a new study in the journal Nature.

"It would have been the size of a very large horse," study co-author Darla Zelenitsky of Canada's University of Calgary told AFP.

The fossils were first dug up in southeastern Mongolia in the early 1970s, but at the time were identified as belonging to a different tyrannosaur, Alectrosaurus.

For half a century, the fossils sat in the drawers at the Institute of Paleontology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in the capital Ulaanbaatar.

Then PhD student Jared Voris, who was on a trip to Mongolia, started looking through the drawers and noticed something was wrong, Zelenitsky said.

It turned out the fossils were well-preserved, partial skeletons of two different individuals of a completely new species.

"It is quite possible that discoveries like this are sitting in other museums that just have not been recognized," Zelenitsky added.

They named the new species Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, which roughly means the dragon prince of Mongolia because it is smaller than the "king" T-Rex.

Zelenitsky said the discovery "helped us clarify a lot about the family history of the tyrannosaur group because it was really messy previously".

The T-Rex represented the end of the family line.

It was the apex predator in North America until 66 million years ago, when an asteroid bigger than Mount Everest slammed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Three quarters of life on Earth was wiped out, including all the dinosaurs that did not evolve into birds.

Around 20 million years earlier, Khankhuuluu -- or another closely related family member -- is now believed to have migrated from Asia to North America using the land bridge that once connected Siberia and Alaska.

This led to tyrannosaurs evolving across North America.

Then one of these species is thought to have crossed back over to Asia, where two tyrannosaur subgroups emerged.

One was much smaller, weighing under a ton, and was nicknamed Pinocchio rex for its long snout.

The other subgroup was huge and included behemoths like the Tarbosaurus, which was only a little smaller than the T-rex.

One of the gigantic dinosaurs then left Asia again for North America, eventually giving rise to the T-Rex, which dominated for just two million years until the asteroid struck.