A 69 million-year-old skull fossil discovered in Antarctica is an ancient relative of geese and ducks, making it the oldest known modern bird.
The fossil was identified to be from a species discovered 20 years ago named Vegavis iaai. This ancient bird lived in the late Cretaceous period alongside the dinosaurs. Previously, scientists had only ever found fragments of the avian, so they could only identify it as either a bird or a bird-like dinosaur. The skull, which was found on Vega Island off the Antarctic peninsula, finally solved the mystery, confirming it was a bird all along.
“It would probably be easily mistaken for modern grebes or loons, which are only distantly related to ducks and to each other,” said Patrick O’Connor from Ohio University, who worked on the study.
The oldest known modern bird
The fossil was found in 2011, but it took hundreds of hours of painstaking work for researchers to be able to observe it as it was trapped inside a hard rocky shell. Excavators spent a lot of time carefully chipping away at its casing so that it could be scanned and studied.
The study, published in the journal Nature, reveals that determining the ancient avian as a modern bird came down to two features that are exclusively found in the species. The first feature is the upper beak which is clearly a premaxilla bone. Secondly, the forebrain was much larger compared to velociraptors and other bird-like dinosaurs, a distinct evolution of modern birds.
“The new fossil shows Vegavis is undoubtedly a modern bird (something that was challenged in the past) and is an exceptional find preserving a strange and surprising morphology,” said Juan Benito Moreno, a fellow in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge and an expert on fossil birds, in an email to CNN.
The Vegavis is clearly related to geese and ducks, but it would have looked incredibly different from its descendants. Its physiognomy and beak structure suggest that it was geared toward hunting fish.
“This bird was a foot-propelled pursuit diver. It used its legs to propel itself underwater as it swam, and something that we were able to observe directly from this new skull was it had jaw musculature (that) was associated with snapping its mouth shut underwater in pursuit of fish. And that is a lifestyle that we observe broadly among loons and grebes,” said Christopher Torres, an assistant professor of biology at the University of the Pacific in California and lead author of the study.
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