The ancient ancestors of geese are the earliest recorded modern birds

The 69 million-year-old skull found in Antarctica is identified as a relative of geese and ducks, making it the oldest known modern bird.

It belongs to the first identified species named 20 years ago Vegavis Iaai, He lived alongside the last dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous period. However, only fragments of the skull had been discovered previously, so scientists were unable to agree on what kind of bird it was, or whether it was a non-vian dinosaur like a bird instead.

The fossil skull was discovered in 2011 on Vega Island off the coast of Antarctic Peninsula. However, it was enveloped in such a fierce rock that the excavator had to scrape away the surrounding stones for hundreds of hours before scanning to reveal details about its interior.

Patrick O'Connor At Ohio University, which worked on the analysis, it says that two almost perfect skull features occur only in modern birds. First, the upper beak is made up of bones, which are primarily called the anterior axis, and the size of the second bone, the maxilla, is significantly reduced, contributing only to a small portion of the bone-palate.

Second, in modern birds, the forebrain is huge compared to the rest of the brain. Like pre-modern birds and dinosaurs of nearby birds Velociraptorthese areas are proportionally much smaller.

meanwhile Vegavis According to O'Connor, it has the ability to clearly mark it as being in the same group of waterfowls as ducks and geese. The bird's beak shape, jaw muscle tissue and hind legs suggest that they were very specialized in diving into the pursuit of fish.

“Perhaps you can easily mistake it for modern graves and runes. This is only related to ducks and each other,” he says.

Jacqueline Nguyen The Australian Museum in Sydney says that this ancient species has been the subject of many debate among bird evolutionary scientists, but new research will help resolve the debate.

“together, [the evidence] It suggests that Vegavis It looks completely different from the duck and geese parents, and this could have been an “evolutionary experiment” in the early history of this group of birds.” says.