Can Penguins live in DESERT

Can Penguins live in DESERT ?

 

                                                                                                                  image source

The main problems to overcome in a desert are finding food, finding mates, retaining water, and avoiding overheating. Finding mates wouldn't be a huge problem if they lived in a colony, but extensive travelling can work just fine. Finding food is very difficult for a larger animal in the desert, especially a predator like a penguin. Living in a colony would compound the problem, so let's assume they woudn't be social animals. Food could come in the form of snakes, lizards, large arthropods, and the occasional small mammal. They already have beaks designed to hold slippery prey, so no real problems here.

Retaining water is the hardest one for most desert animals. It might require serious alteration in anatomy and physiology, but being marine animals penguins are already adapted to conserve water. Overheating is a huge issue for diurnal species, so these penguins would have to be nocturnal. They could escape the heat of the day by crawling into burrows, which they would likely have to construct themselves. This would require changes to their beak (more spade-shaped), face (thick hair on the forehead to keep dirt out of the eyes), and wings (may become more muscular to aid in burrowing). 

Locomotion would be accomplished by having thick-featured, coarse, heavily-oiled undersides. They could then slide over the sand much the same way they slide over ice. Since this would become the primary mode (rather than swimming or walking), the legs would likely become much more muscular and slightly longer. 

Coloration would evolve to be duller, to hide them from prey (and the occasional predator, although there are very few desert predators that would mess with a penguin's beak and bad temper). They would likely become slimmer than their real-life counterparts, an adaptation to aid in digging efficiency. 

So there you go, a brief explanation of how (over thousands of years, maybe millions) a penguin could adapt to be a desert species. The probability: low, but higher than that of most aquatic animals.