A young boy and his dad have made a major fossil find in North Canterbury's Waipara that has global implications when it comes to understanding the evolution of birds.
The 62-million-year-old Zealandian Tropicbird specimen is almost completely intact. Leigh Love and his then-10 year old son David made the world-first discovery together in December 2020.
"Seventeen kilometres from home, it's just amazing. A flying bird, one of a kind, never been found anywhere else in the world. It's pretty special to have that on your doorstep," Love said.
"I was quite amazed at what came out of all the sediment. It was just really cool to see that," David told 1News.
David and Leigh Love's discovery has global implications when it comes to understanding the evolution of birds. (Source: 1News)
The major find didn't come about by accident, with Love spending eight hours a day every day searching for fossils, clocking up thousands of hours in total.
On that day in December 2020 his trained eye picked up something in the silt that looked a little different.
"I had a closer look and started working around this thing and all of a sudden realised I've got a skull."
Canterbury Museum's natural history curator Paul Scofield said the Loves were a "remarkable team".
"For more than 100 years this site has been studied by geologists and no one had found anything significant. This team, Leigh and his son, are now finding internationally significant fossil finds."
University of Canterbury senior research fellow Vanesa de Pietri explained the extinction of dinosaurs and other land and aquatic vertebrates 66 million years ago had left vacant a vast array of habitats that birds were able to conquer.
"Through all these bird fossils we are finding in the Waipara Greensand, many as old as 62.5 million years old, we know that Zealandian shores played a key role in the early evolutionary history of many seabirds.
"Worldwide, the fossil record of birds this age is poor, which makes these Canterbury finds so significant in understanding what was happening with birds during the first five million years following the extinction of the dinosaurs."
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