This evidence comes from a nearly complete, 69-million-year-old skull of an extinct bird, named Vegavis iaai. The fossil is the oldest known modern bird, an early relative of ducks and geese. This extinct bird inhabited the shallow oceans off the coast of Antarctica during the reign of T.

A 68-million-year-old skull fossil found in Antarctica has revealed the oldest known modern bird, which was likely related to the waterfowl that live by lakes and oceans today, according to new research.

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.

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

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, which lived around 69 million years ago – more than 2 million years before the mass extinction that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs.

Sixty-six million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period, an asteroid impact near the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico triggered the extinction of all known non-bird dinosaurs. But for the early ancestors of today's waterfowl,