Hey I had penguin skins! Actually, I had whole penguins - a freezer full of them. Frozen into "lifelike" swimming postures and "mounted" on stainless steel probes...
I was working on a project to investigate the hydrodynamic properties of diving birds, and we scanned the birds using a laser profiling system, generating patterns that were used to cut 3d models that we tested in a towing tank (think 100m long single lane pool).
Hey look! One of the papers is online:
The Journal of Experimental Biology
Ok, that's a picture of the development of one of the Guillemot models, but I had penguins too, honest!
Those birds
stunk. Still, I wish I still had a couple of the models kicking around. They were really cool. I was (in)famous as "that penguin guy" around my department, a reputation not toned down at all when my next project saw me bringing whole muskox hides into the lab...
I'm guessing that penguin wouldn't be a vary tasty treat. One of the reasons that my birds smelled so bad is that they are all fish eaters, and the oily fishyness flavours them nicely. "Grain fed" poultry is common for a reason!
Matthias