Tag Archives: Geese

Thomas Vilgis, a food physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany, has been in love with foie gras for a quarter century. The luxurious delicacy is a pâté or mousse made from the rich, fattened livers of ducks or geese. “It’s something really extraordinary,” Dr. Vilgis said, recalling his early encounters with high-quality foie gras when …

It’s taken decades, but scientists may have finally found Earth’s first fowl. It started in 1993 on Vega Island, a frigid, windswept rock off the Antarctic Peninsula. A mostly headless skeleton of a loon-size diving bird emerged from rocks that, at 68 million years old, predated the dinosaur extinction. The species, which scientists named Vegavis iaai, presented a puzzle: What …