Deep inside Hawke’s Bay's Willow Flat ranges, riverbeds have been scarred and flipped.
There you’ll find hearty fossil hunters scouring the rocky terrain, hiking over hills, and crossing freezing rivers.
Wellington-based fossil hunter Brent Beaven made the trip north to explore the new landscape.
"It's ice-cold water but it's heaps of fun, it's like a little detective adventure every time you come out," Beaven said.
"Searching through, finding a fossil and then working out what is it? [It's] an amazing place to be."
The region is steeped in historical fossil history, the first land-based dinosaur discovered in New Zealand being found in this valley.
Forest Lifeforce Restoration Trust manager Pete Shaw said Cyclone Gabrielle has reset the riverbed.
"You've got big boulders that get jumbled around the stream bed and a very, very, very few small portions of them actually have fossils in them," he said, "so you have a bit of a chance to look at something new after one of these events, but 99.9% of the time you find nothing."
"That’s all part of the thrill, you never know what’s around the corner."
But the group has found something special recently, a huge fossil that had to be helicoptered out of the river.
Early indications point to an Elasmosaurus fossil, a marine reptile that lived around 80 million years ago.
"This valley has been enormously important for the geological history of New Zealand, so when [Kiwi paleontologist] Joan Wiffen was here finding stuff that was completely new for the country, they found the first land dinosaur fossils here," Shaw said.
"It changed all of the thinking about the origins of the New Zealand land mass."
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