A new and nearly complete skull of Vegavis iaai discovered in Antarctica suggests that modern birds originated before the end ...

A 69-million-year-old fossilized skull unearthed in Antarctica could rewrite the history of modern birds. The nearly complete ...

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 ...

A near-perfect fossilized skull discovered in Antarctica reveals the bridge between prehistoric and modern birds, a new study has found. The fossil is a specimen of a species called Vegavis iaai, ...

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – Scientists for years have known what birds living at the end of the age of dinosaurs looked like. Now, they say they might know what one sounded like: quack! The team of ...

An illustration of the Vegavis iaai diving for fish off the coast of the Antarctic peninsula. Mark Witton, 2025. The Chicxulub impactor smashed into Earth, wiped out around 75 percent of our planet’s ...

The discovery of a remarkably near-complete fossil skull of the earliest known modern bird may help settle a long-standing debate about the evolutionary history of our feathered friends. The specimen ...

Learn more about Vegavis iaai, an ancient ancestor of modern-day ducks, and one of the earliest modern birds ever discovered. Sam Walters is the associate editor at Discover Magazine who writes and ...

A 68-million-year-old Antarctic fossil revealed the oldest known modern bird, Vegavis iaai, a duck-sized diver with traits linking it to today’s waterfowl. A fossil unearthed in Antarctica has ...

Some 66 million years ago, when dinosaurs such as T. rex still roamed the Earth, an ancient bird dubbed Vegavis iaai soared high in the sky. While some of its close cousins — like the T. rex — ...

Evolutionary cousins of chickens and ducks roamed the Earth with dinosaurs more than 65 millions years ago, according to a new study that runs counter to a key assumption about when birds got their ...

Figure 1: The half of the Vegavis iaai concretion that preserves most of MLP 93-I-3-1. Figure 4: Histological section from the MLP 92-I-3-1 radius viewed with polarizing microscopy. The following ...