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.
