With its glaciers and sub-zero temperatures, Antarctica hardly seems like a place of refuge. However, the now icy continent might have been just that for the early ancestors of today’s living ...

For decades, scientists have wondered at the taxonomy of Vegavis iaai— an ancient avian specimen that lived in what is now Antarctica during the late Cretaceous period.

The nearly complete skull belongs to Vegavis iaai, a prehistoric waterfowl species that lived alongside Tyrannosaurus rex at the end of the Cretaceous period. This fossil, found on Vega Island ...

A newly studied Vegavis iaai skull from Antarctica confirms that modern bird lineages, like ducks and geese, were evolving ...

"Few birds are as likely to start as many arguments among paleontologists as 'vegavis,'" said professor Christopher Torres.

Known as Vegavis iaai, the bird thrived in late-Cretaceous Antarctica, then a tropical paradise. About a million years before the asteroid that wiped out 75% of life on Earth, it went extinct.

A few fossilized body parts hinted at an enigmatic bird's close ties to waterfowl like ducks and geese. A newfound skull may bolster that idea.

It belongs to a species that was first identified two decades ago named Vegavis iaai, which lived in the late Cretaceous Period alongside the last dinosaurs. But because only fragments of skulls ...

A recently analyzed near-complete fossil skull found in Antarctica has revealed Vegavis iaai to be the oldest known modern bird, according to a study published in Nature. 66 million years ago ...

An Antarctic discovery might offer new insights into the origins of modern birds. The skull, from an ancient relative of ducks and geese known as Vegavis iaai, suggests that the key characteristics of ...

The Late Cretaceous modern (crown) bird,Vegavis iaai, pursuit diving for fish in the shallow ocean off the coast of the Antarctic peninsula, with ammonites and plesiosaurs forcompany. (Credit: Mark ...