Vegaviidae

Vegaviidae is a proposed extinct family of anseriform birds which lived during the Late Cretaceous and possibly the Paleocene. The monophyly of the family has been questioned by subsequent studies, with the only definitive member Vegavis known from the Maastrichtian stage of Antarctica, though some fossil genera from other continents have been assigned to this clade.

== Taxonomic history == In 2017, Agnolín and colleagues performed a phylogenetic analysis of various extinct avian genera from the Late Cretaceous of Southern Hemisphere including Vegavis. They found support for those genera making up a family of birds showing specializations to diving, and proposed the family Vegaviidae which is classified as stem-Anseriformes. They also suggested that some fragmentary specimens from the Paleogene of New Zealand, Chile and Antarctica represent indeterminate vegaviids, providing evidence that some families of modern birds crossed the K–Pg boundary unaffected by the extinction event that occurred, with Gondwana having an important role for the evolution of modern birds.