VEGA ISLAND: Near the end of the age of dinosaurs, a bird resembling today’s loons and grebes dove for fish and other prey in the perilous waters off Antarctica. Thanks to a nearly complete fossil skull, scientists now have identified this waterfowl as the oldest-known member of the lineage spanning all birds alive today.

The new fossil unearthed on Vega Island near the Antarctic Peninsula of the ancient bird named Vegavis iaai dates to about 69 million years ago, approximately three million years before the asteroid strike at the end of the Cretaceous Period that wiped out the dinosaurs, aside from their avian descendants.

Fossils of Vegavis were first described two decades ago. But without sufficient cranial remains its place on the bird family tree had remained ambiguous. The researchers now were able to diagnose Vegavis as nesting among the anatomically modern birds based on two cranial characteristics — the bones of its upper beak and the shape of its brain.

“Both of those features are observable in the new Vegavis specimen,” said evolutionary biologist Chris Torres of the University of the Pacific in California, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature.

Vegavis was an early waterfowl, a group that also includes ducks and geese. Vegavis appears to have been ecologically specialised to pursue fish and other prey underwater in a shallow marine ecosystem. Antarctica at the time was not the desolate land of snow and ice that it is today, but rather a forested landscape with a temperate climate.

Published in Dawn, February 6th, 2025