Geese-like birds seem to have survived the dinosaur extinction

By Jeff Hecht

They looked like loons but honked like geese, and are kin to a group of modern birds that includes ducks, geese and chickens. Meet the Vegaviidae, a newly named group of waterbirds that seemingly lived through the mass extinction that took out the dinosaurs.

Although the Vegaviidae are now extinct, they are the first bird group known to have survived the mass extinction, says Federico Agnolin at the Bernardino Rivadavia Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences in Buenos Aires.

At the end of the Cretaceous Period 66 million years ago, a mass extinction – probably caused by an asteroid impact – wiped out a swathe of species, including all non-avian dinosaurs. Birds survived the disaster, but which groups carried the flame has been unclear.

Bird fossils from the end-Cretaceous between 72 and 66 million years ago are few and fragmentary, says Joel Cracraftat the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

One of the few known species is Vegavis iaai, discovered on Vega Island off West Antarctica and described in 2005. Vegavis was a fish-eating diving bird that resembled a modern loon. However, Agnolin says its skeleton shows that it was related to ducks and geese, and to land fowl such as chickens.

Last year, palaeontologists described a second Vegavis fossil that included a syrinx, the bird version of vocal cords. They concluded that the birds honked like geese.

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