A family out for a stroll on southern Vancouver Island stumbled upon the extraordinary fossilized remains of a 25-million-year-old flightless bird that has created a flap in the world of paleontology.
The fossil was in good enough condition for researchers to identify the animal as a new species of a plotopterid, a long-extinct penguin or cormorant-like bird never before found in Canada.
A collarbone from the bird was found inside a slab of rock on a Sooke, B.C., beach.
It’s only the second set of fossilized bird bones found on southern Vancouver Island since 1895, said bird expert Gary Kaiser of the Royal B.C. Museum.
Fossils of birds are extremely rare because the fragile and hollow bones don’t hold up to crushing weight, acidic soils and elements like other fossils do.
“They get broken up, crushed easily,” Kaiser said in an interview Tuesday. “The bones simply dissolve. They disappear.”
In this case, the sandstone and lack of acid in the water seemed to preserve the fossil, he said.
B.C. family’s fossil find identified as 25-million-year-old flightless bird
Kimchi and Justice 