The ancestor of modern ducks and geese may have waddled alongside the dinosaurs

The age of the dinosaurs may conjure images of large, fearsome reptiles in the minds of many – but those were far from the only lifeforms walking the planet. In fact, some of the earliest bird species were populating the skies … or even wading in the waters.

A recent study published in the scientific journal “Nature” sheds light on how one particular skull from this era, that of the duck-like Vegavis iaai, may answer a longstanding question about modern bird evolution.

Chris Torres, an assistant professor at the University of the Pacific, was one of the scholars working on the study. He began this research during his time as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, working with Dr. Julia Clarke.

He joined Texas Standard to discuss the findings. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: Congratulations on this work. When we think of fossil discoveries from the dinosaur era, I guess we often think of Jurassic Park – these gigantic creatures. What about this ancient bird? Is it one of these gigantic creatures, or how much does it differ from modern birds? 

Chris Torres: I would describe it as, if you were birding back in the Cretaceous, you would not recognize this as being any different from any bird that’s alive today. It is certainly not what we imagine when we think of dinosaurs that were alive at the time.

So what did it look like, and where did it live?

So it lived off the coast of Antarctica about 68 or 69 million years ago.

This was the time when Antarctica looked very different from it does today. It was covered in temperate forests that are more similar to the modern-day Pacific Northwest of Washington State, much more so than the frozen wasteland we imagine today.

And it was what we would call a foot-propelled diving bird. So it used its legs to propel itself underwater in pursuit of primarily fish.

How interesting. Now, I understand this skull is one of the rare, nearly complete skulls of this species. How did you and your colleagues go about studying it?

So, yes, the skull is a nearly complete skull, which is extraordinarily rare. Bird skulls are incredibly fragile, and typically they easily get destroyed. So for us to have this beautiful, nearly complete skull is extremely rare.

And so my colleagues and I spent hundreds of hours over the course of many years … And I should emphasize this part was primarily my colleagues. I can’t take credit for this part, but hundreds of hours over the course of years were spent cleaning the fossil off, exposing the preserved bone and removing any rock that obscured our view.

Digital reconstruction of the Late Cretaceous (~69 million years old) crown bird Vegavis iaai that was completed following high-resolution micro-computed tomography of a fossil-bearing concretion discovered on Vega Island, Antarctic Peninsula. Joseph Groenke (Ohio University) and Christopher Torres (University of the Pacific), 2025.

And then we were able to investigate its actual cranial anatomical shapes and how those shapes compare to comparable shapes in modern birds to get an idea of not only what kind of bird is it, but how was it living its life when it was alive?

I gather that this points to the answer of a question that’s been looming out there when it comes to bird evolution, and that question being, as I understand it, whether it took the demise of non-avian dinosaurs to open the door for modern bird evolution.

What does this discovery tell you about that?

So this discovery is really crucial for helping us understand exactly the nuances of the pattern that you’re describing.

Something that we understand about the so-called age of the dinosaurs is that the world was already full of birds, but those birds were very distantly related from modern birds, both in terms of just their family tree, but also their anatomy. Anatomically, they were very different.

This new skull indicates that an anatomically modern bird was present at the same time. And then when this asteroid hit the planet 66 million years ago, now we understand that nearly every bird that was alive at the time died out, with the exception of certain very specific lineages that still persist today – in this case, ducks and geese.

Christopher Torres, former NSF postdoctoral research fellow at Ohio University and lead author of the paper describing the Vegavis iaai skull, began his work on the study as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Ben Siegel (Ohio University), 2021.

Very interesting. All right. I understand that this is just the latest discovery you and your colleagues have made regarding this species. What’s next?

What’s next is we hope to go back and find more.

Any time we are looking at an extinct organism, that organism was living its life in a world full of other life. There were things it was eating, things that were trying to eat it. And in order for us to understand any species, whether it’s this ancient duck thing or T-Rex, we need to understand the world it lived in.

And so our goal is to return and find more evidence of what this world was like and color in that picture so that we can understand – this was the world going into a mass extinction event. We seem to be living in a world that’s going into something comparable to a mass extinction event right now.

How did this play out in the past? What made it so that ducks and geese could survive? And is it going to play out that way again?

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