A family out on a stroll along a Vancouver beach in Canada discovered fossilized remains of a 25-million-year-old flightless bird. The clavicle from the bird is now the second fossil discovered on southern Vancouver Island since 1895.
The rare fossil was in good condition enabling researchers to identify it as an unknown variety of plotopterid, an extinct family that lived in the North Pacific from the late Eocene to the early Miocene period. Today, fossils from this type of flightless birds have only been found in the United States and Japan.
When Gary Kaiser, a paleontologist and research associate at the Royal British Columbia (BC) Museum, got a hold of the fossil, he immediately looked into a local First Nations dictionary to look for an appropriate name for it.
"I wanted a First Nations word," Kaiser said.
Hence, Kaiser and his colleague Junya Wantanabe of Kyoto University named the penguin-like bird as Stemec suntoku, which originates from the language of the T'Sou-Ke people. It means long-necked, black water bird.
Fossils from birds are extraordinary because these are fragile. This makes these bones unable to withstand elements like heat or coldness unlike other fossils. Apparently, the sandstone and lack of water acidity contributed to the preservation of the fossil.
The fossil was discovered by a father and two children when they went walking on the beach. The daughter discovered the fossil in a slab of rock. They immediately brought it to the museum for examination.
Though Kaiser is convinced that the fossil is from an animal similar to a penguin, other scientists say that it looks more closely like cormorants, a species of black and diving sea birds.
"It's a bit of a fight, but not unusual in biology because there's no way of telling," Kaiser added.
The study announcing the discovery was published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.
"We wish to thank L. Suntok and G. Suntok for donating the fossil of Stemec to the Royal BC Museum," the authors acknowledged in the study.
