Paleontologists have found the first complete skull of a controversial prehistoric bird. Known as Vegavis iaai, the bird thrived in late-Cretaceous Antarctica, then a tropical paradise. About a ...

The fossil, a nearly complete, 69-million-year-old skull, belongs to an extinct bird named Vegavis iaai and was collected ...

Previous Vegavis fossil specimens also lacked a complete skull, said study coauthor Patrick O’Connor, a professor of anatomical sciences at Ohio University.

While Vegavis has features that clearly mark it as being in the same group of waterfowl as ducks and geese, it would have ...

Vegavis’ long beak and brain shape place it in the group that includes all modern birds and represents the earliest evidence of birds’ eventual widespread distribution across the planet.

Previous Vegavis fossil specimens also lacked a complete skull, said study coauthor Patrick O’Connor, a professor of anatomical sciences at Ohio University.

Vegavis was first described two decades ago, at which time it was argued to be an early member of the modern birds—but more recent analyses cast doubt on this suggestion.

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 ...

Vegavis was a fish-eating diving bird that resembled a modern loon. However, Agnolin says its skeleton shows that it was related to ducks and geese, and to land fowl such as chickens.

The Vegavis iaai holotype specimen from Vega Island, western Antarctica, was discovered in 1992 and received rudimentary preparation that, in fact, degraded delicate bones that were originally ...