“What do the ducks know that we don't know? What are their secrets and how can we use them?” This is the question that fueled Assistant Professor of Biology Chris Torres in his research that led to the discovery of the oldest known modern bird skull.

First published in the multidisciplinary science journal Nature, the discovery has garnered recent extensive national news coverage, including a story in the New York Times.

The skull belonged to Vegavis iaai—a Late Cretaceous diving bird that lived at the same time as Tyrannosaurus rex and proof that waterfowl survived extinction from the asteroid that wiped them out. The rocks containing the fossilized skull were collected during an expedition by the Antarctic Peninsula Paleontology Project.

After being meticulously extracted, they were scanned into a system where Torres, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Ohio University’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine at the time, digitally pieced them together like a puzzle, revealing the full skull. By assessing the shape of the brain and beak bones, Torres was able to link the skull to today’s waterfowl.

“The skull was embedded in rock for 69 million years. In that time, things are going to go wrong,” Torres said. “The pieces that are left, some of them are torn in half, some of those are missing pieces. Even then—you don't know the picture on the box, right? You know what other pictures on other boxes look like, and you're using those to predict what this one looked like. I think it scratches the same itch a jigsaw puzzle does, but the stakes are much higher.”

Torres said understanding how birds responded to the mass extinction event could have substantial implications.

“There are patterns through time, and those patterns are going to outlast us. They're going to outlast whatever damage we're doing to the world today,” Torres said. “I want to know how those processes played out previously, and how are they going to play out this time?”

That’s exactly what Torres plans to pursue in the next steps of his research at University of the Pacific.

The ongoing research project is focused on understanding what the rock and fossil records in Antarctica say about how life responds to catastrophic, short term global climate change, and how birds resembling Vegavis iaai avoided extinction while non-bird dinosaurs did not.

“Put T. rex and a duck in a fight,” Torres said, “and T. rex wins. But when an asteroid hits the planet, suddenly T. rex doesn't win anymore. Why is that? Why are ducks so hardcore they can take an asteroid to the face, but T. rex can't?”

The answer to this question could provide insight into what a future affected by catastrophes like global warming, wildfires and other major disasters could be like and what qualities the organisms that avoid extinction possess.

Torres, who joined the university in August, said one reason he was drawn to Pacific to continue this research was for its culture of impactful research centered around student involvement.

“The idea of doing meaningful research and having students be a key component is exactly what I want to do, and this department especially is where that is done. It’s the perfect environment to continue that research tradition,” Torres said.