Imagine discovering a whole lost world tucked away inside a cave, a world no one even knew was there. That’s pretty much what happened near Waitomo on New Zealand’s North Island, where scientists have cracked open a fossil record that rewrites the story of one of Earth’s most unusual bird kingdoms.
According to a study titled ‘The first Early Pleistocene (ca 1 Ma) fossil terrestrial vertebrate fauna from a cave in New Zealand reveals substantial avifaunal turnover in the last million years,’ published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Paleontology, researchers from Flinders University and Canterbury Museum found that the fossils in a limestone cave are from 12 bird species and four frog species that lived approximately one million years ago.
This is the first time scientists have recovered a large collection of terrestrial vertebrate fossils from this period anywhere in New Zealand, a find that researchers are calling a “missing volume” of the country’s natural history.
A world completely unlike today's New Zealand
The bird community of New Zealand a million years ago was dramatically different from the one that met the first human settlers about 750 years ago. Associate Professor Trevor Worthy, lead author from Flinders University, says this is a newly recognized avifauna for New Zealand, one that humans replaced a million years later.
The cave, now called Moa Eggshell Cave, contained the bones of several remarkable species. These include a now-extinct ancestor of the takahē (a flightless swamphen native to New Zealand) and an ancient pigeon species closely related to Australia’s bronzewing pigeons, which were not around in the million years before humans arrived.
