One Gentoo Penguin Species Is Now Four
In this composite image by photographer, Gary Krosin, you can see that the Gentoo on the left is the Southern form Pygoscelis ellesworthi. The one on the right belongs to the Northern lineage and is Pygoscelis papua. If you compare overall size and mass, the Northern Gentoo is larger and bulkier with longer flippers and larger feet. The bill is also larger. © Gary Krosin, 2010
There is probably no species of penguin where a taxonomy had been more argued and debated than the Gentoo, a widespread species of the Southern Ocean.
For years, Gentoo Penguins have been treated as one species with three subspecies. In a newly published paper, researchers combined genetic evidence with adaptive divergence, geographic isolation, and life-history traits, to show that the Gentoo is really four distinct evolutionary lineages.
The discovery was made by an international team of penguin experts led by researchers in Chile and at the University of California, Berkeley. Their findings were published in the journal Communications Biology in April 2026.
The researchers concluded that the three previously recognized subspecies of Gentoo Penguins are genetically distinct enough to be elevated to species status:
Eastern Lineage — Pygoscelis taeniata, residing on the Crozet, Marion and Macquarie islands.
Northern Lineage — Pygoscelis papua, restricted to the Falkland/Malvinas, and Martillo islands in South America.
Southern Lineage — Pygoscelis ellsworthi, which nests on the Antarctica Peninsula, coastal Antarctica, and South Georgia Island.
The fourth is entirely new: Pygoscelis kerguelensis sp. nov., which resides in the Kerguelen Islands, located in the Southern Indian Ocean. If the revision is accepted, it will be the first new penguin species described in more than a century. The last was the Northern Rockhopper, Eudyptes moseleyi, named in 1921.
That’s the good news! The bad news is where it lives. The sub-Antarctic Kerguelen Islands (also known as the Desolation Islands) are located in one of the most isolated places on Earth.
There are many people who do not have a fully kept-up bird list, but know exactly how many penguins they’ve seen. And many people will have seen all 19 of the historic assemblage. Now, there is very little likelihood of anybody seeing all the four Gentoo Penguin species, as the Kerguelens are a protected French area with controlled access at all times. There will be some readers of this short note that will have been with Zegrahm Expeditions back in 1988, when we set sail on a really ambitious Indian Ocean itinerary that included almost all of these far-flung islands. If that is the case, I suggest that you begin retrospective ticking.