Duck fossil fuels hope for dinosaur discovery

A UCD researcher has discovered the oldest known duck fossil while rooting through a Moscow museum. Dick Ahlstrom reports

Scientists in Dublin and Moscow have identified the oldest known duck in the fossil record. It lived in the Gobi Desert during the reign of Tyrannosaurus Rex more than 65 million years ago.

It was found in a group of unidentified fossils stored in Moscow, which were dug out of the ground more than 15 years ago. There it lay until found by University College Dublin zoology lecturer, Dr Gareth Dyke.

"I found it in the collection in the museum in Moscow," he says. "I was working in Moscow about this time last year and got a chance to study some of the material they collected on an earlier trip."

The find is highly significant because the duck fossil in question, a new taxon called Teviornis gobiensis, lived before the mass extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs.

The Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction Event, or K-T Event for short, was most likely caused by a collision with a massive asteroid. It drew a line in the sand for 70 per cent of all life on Earth and brought an end to the age of dinosaurs.

"Knowing whether the ancestors of living birds existed before the K-T is important, as is knowing which of the modern birds existed alongside the dinosaurs," says Dr Dyke.

Teviornis gobiensis was just such a bird. "It is the oldest duck known in the fossil record. It is also the first duck found that lived before the K-T cataclysm. It was a duck from the Cretaceous."

It is six to seven million years older than the previous oldest duck, which lived after the K-T Event. The find only included the bird's wing but this was enough to include it among the duck family, he explains. The wing displayed fused finger bones, a characteristic "only seen in the birds of the order which includes ducks", says Dr Dyke. "We didn't know what it was initially, but through comparative work we were able to identify it.

"It was found around 1986 on one of the Russian/Mongolian expeditions to the Gobi Desert, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is the thing about palaeontology - you never know what you will find. It had lain there for 15 years in a Moscow museum without being described."

He and collaborators, Evgeny Kurochkin and Alexander Karhu of the Palaeontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, described their findings in the American Museum of Natural History journal.

The bird was relatively similar to ducks seen today and would have been recognised as such. This is why its discovery is so significant, he adds. "There is very little evidence for modern birds living during the Cretaceous.

"It is equivalent to a really chunky duck seen today, about twice the size of a mallard, but smaller than a swan. It was probably an animal that didn't spend much time in water. It had an ecology that didn't match any of the living groups of ducks. We don't know what it ate because we don't have any of its skull."

There would have been little fresh water given the area where it was found. "The Gobi Desert has been a desert for more than 100 million years."

He and UCD colleague Julia Sigwart, who works as a museum collections researcher with the Natural History Museum in Dublin, will spend a month in western Russia this summer on a fresh expedition to discover fossils. UCD and the museum have set up a new research programme to help promote the quality collection of fossils and other material held by the museum.

"We hope to find quality material in Russia. I want to find dinosaurs because dinosaurs will give me more publicity than ducks," says Dr Dyke. "Publicity is important because it will give the programme we have with the museum more coverage."

This will bring scientists to Dublin to conduct research on the collection. "I want people to be aware the collections in the museum are accessible."