The Search for the Original Silly Goose in the Fossil Record

the-search-for-the-original-silly-goose-in-the-fossil-record

Science|The Search for the Original Silly Goose in the Fossil Record

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/science/goose-duck-fossil.html

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Trilobites

Some paleontologists think that fossils recovered from Antarctica are evidence of birds similar to modern geese and ducks that lived alongside the dinosaurs.

An illustration of loon-like birds on and below the water surface with a bright light breaking through from a partly-cloudy sky. Ammonites and other prehistoric creatures teem the sea.
A life reconstruction of Vegavis iaai, a late Cretaceous loon-size bird diving for fish in the shallow ocean off the coast of the Antarctic peninsula, with ammonites and plesiosaurs for company.Credit…Mark Witton

It’s taken decades, but scientists may have finally found Earth’s first fowl.

It started in 1993 on Vega Island, a frigid, windswept rock off the Antarctic Peninsula. A mostly headless skeleton of a loon-size diving bird emerged from rocks that, at 68 million years old, predated the dinosaur extinction. The species, which scientists named Vegavis iaai, presented a puzzle: What bird was it a feather of?

Nearly 20 years later, a 2011 Antarctic expedition turned up a bird skull that more recently was matched with Vegavis iaai. In an analysis published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers are sticking their necks out to suggest that the mysterious Antarctic avian is an ancient relative of today’s geese and ducks, and the oldest known modern bird.

“It’s exactly the kind of thing we need to help fill in an evolutionary gap,” said Christopher Torres, a paleontologist at Ohio University and an author on the paper. But he conceded, “that’s also what makes it so incredibly controversial.”

In the past few decades, Dr. Torres said, researchers looking at bird genomics suggested that some modern bird families — particularly waterfowl and game fowl — probably appeared before the asteroid impact that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. But before the discovery of Vegavis in the 1990s, no characteristic fossils had been identified, leaving a gap between molecular data and rocky physical evidence.

The mixture of archaic and modern skeletal traits in the original Vegavis specimen also made it difficult to place, said Chase Brownstein, a paleontologist at Yale University who was not involved in the research. Some researchers suggested that Vegavis might have been one of several families of extinct Mesozoic birds — some with toothed bills and clawed wing-fingers — that didn’t survive the Cretaceous period extinction. Others believed it was a modern bird, closer to loons, grebes or geese.

The skull found in 2011 helped breach this prehistoric logjam.

Image

A digital reconstruction of Vegavis iaai’s skull, completed following high-resolution micro-computed tomography of a fossil-bearing concretion discovered on Vega Island.Credit…C. Torres and J. Gronke

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