The search for original silly goose in the fossil folder

It took decades, but scientists may have finally found the first poultry on the earth.

He started in 1993 on Vega Island, an icy rock and swept away by the wind off the Antarctic Peninsula. A skeleton mainly head of a diving bird the size of a loon came out of rocks which, at 68 million years old, preceded the extinction of dinosaurs. The species, which scientists have appointed Vegavis IAAIpresented a puzzle: which bird was it a pen?

Almost 20 years later, an expedition to Antarctica from 2011 revealed a skull of birds which was more recently twinned with Vegavis IAAI. In a published analysis Wednesday in the Nature JournalThe researchers shoot their necks to suggest that the mysterious Antarctic Avian is an ancient parent of today’s geese and ducks, and the oldest known modern bird.

“This is exactly the kind of thing we need to help fill an evolutionary gap,” said Christopher Torres, paleontologist at the University of Ohio and author on the newspaper. But he conceded: “This is also what makes him so incredibly controversial.”

In recent decades, said Dr. Torres, researchers who look at the genomics of birds have suggested that certain families of modern birds – especially savvagin and game poultry – have probably appeared before the impact of asteroids that annihilate non -avian dinosaurs. But before the discovery of Vegavis in the 1990s, no characteristic fossil had been identified, leaving a gap between molecular data and rocky physical evidence.

The mixture of archaic and modern skeletal features in the original specimen of Vegavis also made room difficult, said Chase Brownstein, paleontologist at the University of Yale who was not involved in research. Some researchers have suggested that Vegavis could have been one of the many families of extinguished mesozoic birds – some with toothed invoices and fingered wing fingers – which did not survive the extinction of the Cretaceous period. Others thought it was a modern bird, closer to the humans, the Greebes or the geese.

The skull found in 2011 helped rape this prehistoric logjam.

The researchers of the new article generated an almost complete three -dimensional reconstruction of the head of the bird. They found that Vegavis had the beak and the form of the toothbrain characteristic of modern birds, said Dr. Torres, as well as specific skull traits which, according to them, suggest that the bird is closely linked to modern savvagine. But – and here is the silly part – the skull is very different from those of living ducks or geese. His beak was long and pointed. He had large glands to eliminate the salt from the body and powerful jaw muscles which allowed the bird to break its jaws quickly underwater.

The entire skeleton points to a bird that plunged underwater after the fish and propelled itself with powerful kick legs, said Dr. Torres. Which is different from any modern aquatic birds, “and much more similar to what we see in modern and grouses. “”

Despite the plane and head of the wacky body of the bird, the fine details of its skull – including its jaw and its beak – show specific features that suggest savage, said Dr. Torres.

While Dr. Brownstein described the discovery of the “exciting” vegavis skull, he is not convinced that it is enough to settle the debate on the identity of the animal – or to clarify when the bird lines like Savagine appeared. But even the most conservative interpretation of the skull indicates that modern birds and their nearest parents were extremely diversified anatomically at the end of the Cretaceous, he said.

Others are more enthusiastic.

The Fact that A Bird With Such Modern Features was Around by the End of the Dinosaurs’ Reign Suggests that Other Major Lineages Of Living Birds Wre Likely Present As Well, Said Gerardo Álvarez Herrera, A Paleontologist with the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Argentine MUS not involved in the study. It is possible that more in -depth exploration discovers “the ancestors of ostriches, poultry, neoaves and ducks which may have traveled the sides of non -avian dinosaurs”.