Study finds birds nested in Arctic alongside dinosaurs
Marmian Grimes
907-474-7902
May 29, 2025
An illustration of Cretaceous Period birds with other dinosaurs from the same time period in the background. A paper in the journal Science documents the earliest-known example of birds nesting in the polar regions.
Spring in the Arctic brings forth a plethora of peeps and downy hatchlings as millions of birds gather to raise their young.
The same was true 73 million years ago, according to a paper featured on the cover of this week’s edition of the journal Science. The paper documents the earliest-known example of birds nesting in the polar regions.
“Birds have existed for 150 million years,” said lead author Lauren Wilson, a doctoral student at Princeton University who earned her master’s degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “For half of the time they have existed, they have been nesting in the Arctic.”
The paper is the result of Wilson’s master’s thesis research at UAF. Using dozens of tiny fossilized bones and teeth from an Alaska excavation site, she and her colleagues identified multiple types of birds — diving birds that resembled loons, gull-like birds, and several kinds of birds similar to modern ducks and geese — that were breeding in the Arctic while dinosaurs roamed the same lands.
Prior to this study, the earliest known evidence of birds reproducing in either the Arctic or Antarctic was about 47 million years ago, well after an asteroid killed 75% of the animals on Earth.
“This pushes back the record of birds breeding in the polar regions by 25 to 30 million years,” said Pat Druckenmiller, the paper’s senior author, director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North and Wilson’s advisor for her master’s degree work. The bird fossils are part of the museum’s collections.
“The Arctic is considered the nursery for modern birds,” he said. “It’s kind of cool when you go to Creamer’s Field [a Fairbanks-area stopover for migrating geese, ducks and cranes], to know that they have been doing this for 73 million years.”
The fossilized tip of a hatchling bird beak sits on the end of a finger.
The mere existence of the large collection of ancient bird fossils is remarkable, Wilson said, given how delicate bird bones are. That is doubly true for baby bird bones, which are porous and easily destroyed.
“Finding bird bones from the Cretaceous is already a very rare thing,” she said. “To