Brains
A social media post in January 2026 from the White House featuring former U.S. President Donald Trump alongside a penguin in Greenland — captioned “Embrace the penguin”—briefly went viral earlier this year. While the image was intended as political messaging with regard’s to President Trump’s plans for Greenland, it also unintentionally revived a long-standing misconception: that penguins are associated with the Arctic. In reality, penguins are native to the Southern Hemisphere, and research from 2020 even suggests that their evolutionary origins are far from the icy Antarctic landscapes they were linked to for many years.
A study from August 2020 published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley found that modern penguins likely first evolved in the cooler coastal regions of Australia and New Zealand, before later spreading south into Antarctic waters. The conclusions were based on genomic analysis of blood and tissue samples from 18 penguin species, allowing scientists to reconstruct their evolutionary history and patterns of diversification.
The study estimates that penguins originated around 22 million years ago in temperate marine environments, rather than in extreme polar conditions. From these early populations, species such as king and emperor penguins are believed to have migrated toward Antarctica, likely driven by abundant food resources in colder southern oceans.
Researchers also found that penguin evolution has been shaped by major climatic shifts, particularly the formation and intensification of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Over millions of years, this helped isolate and cool the Southern Ocean, enabling penguins to expand into a wide range of environments—from near-freezing Antarctic waters to subtropical regions such as the Galápagos Islands.
According to UC Berkeley professor Rauri Bowie, penguins display one of the broadest thermal ranges of any seabird group, reflecting their long evolutionary history of adaptation across dramatically different ocean conditions. The professor of Integrative Biology and curator in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley stated: “We are able to show how penguins have been able to diversify to occupy the incredibly different thermal environments they live in today, going from 9° Celsius (48°F) in the waters around Australia and New Zealand, down to negative temperatures in Antarctica and up to 26°C (79°F) in the Galápagos Islands.”
However, Bowie cautioned that this adaptability has limits. While penguins have evolved over millions of years, the current pace of ocean warming may exceed their ability to adjust, raising concerns about their long-term resilience in a rapidly changing climate. “But we want to make the point that it has taken millions of years for penguins to be able to occupy such diverse habitats, and at the rate that oceans are warming, penguins are not going to be able to adapt fast enough to keep up with changing climate,” Bowie emphasized.
Today, penguins are found across the Southern Hemisphere, including Antarctica, South America, southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and subantarctic islands — but certainly not in the Arctic or Greenland.
Embrace the penguin. pic.twitter.com/kKlzwd3Rx7
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 23, 2026
