Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - A Tiny Fossil From New Zealand Is Another Huge Problem For Creationism

An artist's impression of the bowerbird that possibly once lived in New Zealand, showing yellow plumage

A male satin bowerbird by his highly decorated avenue bower.

Photo by Daniel J. Field

Tiny fossil bone helps unlock history of the bowerbird | University of Otago
Apart from the fact that this fossil is a million years old, there is nothing in this discovery that creationists will struggle to dismiss with one of their well-worn stock phrases — “It was just a bird ‘kind’,” “It wasn’t transitional,” and so on. This is despite the fact that their Bible is remarkably vague about how many bird ‘kinds’ there were, includes bats as birds, and says absolutely nothing about anything outside a few square miles of the Middle East.

And of course, the date — like the entire fossil record — will be casually brushed aside as forged, fabricated, or “wrongly dated using proven false carbon dating” [sic].

But to anyone who actually values evidence and truth, and is not intent on proving their strength by clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in defiance of all contrary evidence, this find is genuinely fascinating. It provides strong evidence that the bowerbirds, today confined to Australia and New Guinea, were once far more widespread. This conclusion is based on the fact that the fossil was discovered in New Zealand. It is also suggested that climate change may have brought about its extinction in New Zealand and driven the bowerbirds' range back to its present distribution.

The discovery is reported in the journal Historical Biology by researchers from University of Cambridge, University of Otago, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A [news release from the University of Otago]() explains the significance of the find and four of the authors have also written an article about the find in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Published: October 22, 2025 8.11pm BST

A tiny fossil suggests bowerbirds once lived in ancient New Zealand – new research

Getty Images

Elizabeth Steell, University of Cambridge; Alan Tennyson, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; Nic Rawlence, University of Otago, and Pascale Lubbe, University of Otago

Most of our knowledge of New Zealand’s prehistoric bird diversity comes from long-lost species with bones large enough to be studied by eye. But many bird bones are so tiny we can barely see their features without a microscope.

Some 14 to 19 million years ago, in the Miocene epoch, the remains of thousands of birds were preserved in and around the vast Lake Manuherikia, located in present-day Central Otago.

We know a lot about some of the lake’s larger birds such as ducks. But we have less information on smaller birds such as the highly diverse passerines, which include songbirds. Modern species in this group include the tūī and tauhou/silvereyes.

The minute bones of passerines are difficult to find in the field, and only come to light after many hours of painstaking sorting under a microscope. But technologies such as micro-CT scanning are now helping to reveal their secrets.

Our new research adds a quirky new passerine to the fossil record of Aotearoa and shows just how unique its ancient biodiversity was. The new species appears to be in the bowerbird family of songbirds, which are not native in New Zealand today.

Made famous by Sir David Attenborough’s nature documentaries, bowerbirds are best known for their elaborate courtship behaviour and the males’ efforts to decorate bowers with coloured fruit or leaves to attract a mate. These showy males are often brightly coloured, while females are more drab – and very choosy about their mates.

Courtship of the bowerbirds.

Until now, bowerbirds and their fossil relatives have only been found in Australia and New Guinea.

The St Bathans bowerbird

Among all the tiny bones found in the St Bathans fossil site, a curious foot bone stood out. When we compared digital models of the fossil to a great number of other passerines, it bore all the hallmarks of a bowerbird; but this one was much smaller and more slender than living bowerbirds.

An artist’s impression of the bowerbird that may have once lived in New Zealand.

Sasha Votyakova/Te Papa, CC BY-SA

Its name is Aevipertidus gracilis – the gracile one from a lost age.

The size of Aevipertidus gracilis would make it the smallest known bowerbird. Most living bowerbirds are chunky, weighing anywhere from 62 to 265 grams and spending time both on the ground and in the forest canopy.

New Zealand’s bowerbird weighed around 33 grams, similar to a korimako/bellbird but with longer feet.

Our analysis suggests the St Bathans bowerbird foot was most similar in shape to a group known to construct walk-through avenue bowers, such as the brightly coloured flame bowerbird.

We can only speculate about its plumage and behaviour, but Aevipertidus gracilis may also have performed elaborate displays to attract a mate.

The St Bathans bowerbird joins other New Zealand passerines with an ancient history – including huia, kōkako, piopio and mohua – whose ancestors flew across the ocean to Zealandia millions of years ago.

The St Bathans bowerbird lived far from its relatives in warm Australia and New Guinea. If it was a fruit eater, it may have been poorly equipped for temperatures that began dropping dramatically around 14 million years ago and caused a reduction in plant diversity. Ultimately, it may have become a victim of climate change.

Conservation palaeobiology

Fossils like the St Bathans bowerbird as well as genetic research are revealing New Zealand’s story of bird evolution, with extinctions and repeated colonisations across geological time.

For example, prehistoric shelducks colonised ancient Zealandia, only for them to go extinct. Around two million years ago, ancestors of the pūtangitangi/paradise shelduck recolonised New Zealand.

The same is true for the ancient passerine relatives of magpies, which went extinct after the Miocene. But unlike the native shelducks, modern makipai/Australian magpies were introduced by Europeans in the 1860s.

Some researchers suggest these long-extinct species muddy the concept of what is native or introduced in New Zealand, using magpies as an example.

Even though ancient magpie relatives once lived in Zealandia, it doesn’t mean their living cousins belong in the modern ecosystem. This thinking could undermine conservation management and lead to ecosystems being more degraded by invasive species.

The St Bathans wonderland existed in a Zealandia before the Southern Alps rose to create the South Island’s backbone. Lake Manuherikia was home to many plants and animals, including crocodilians and tortoises, making it very different from what is there today. It doesn’t make sense to consider these ancient animals as native in modern Aotearoa.

New discoveries like the St Bathans bowerbird provide wonderful insights into New Zealand’s biological heritage. Let’s celebrate these discoveries as clues to the past and not use them to undermine the ongoing fight to protect the country’s special living plants and animals.

We thank the coauthors on our paper, Daniel Field and Alex Brown, Sasha Votyakova for the artist’s reconstruction, the landowners at St Bathans for access to their land, Jean-Claude Stahl for preparation of the fossil photos, and numerous fieldworkers who helped with our excavations.

Elizabeth Steell, Research Fellow in Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge; Alan Tennyson, Curator of Vertebrates, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; Nic Rawlence, Associate Professor in Ancient DNA, University of Otago, and Pascale Lubbe, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Molecular Ecology, University of Otago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

This discovery is a reminder that biodiversity is not static but dynamic, shaped over millions of years by the shifting forces of climate and geology. What we see in the world today is just a snapshot of an ever-changing picture — species appear, disperse, adapt, and vanish as the environment evolves around them.

New Zealand, Australia and New Guinea were once connected through complex ecological and climatic networks, allowing species like the bowerbirds to range far more widely than they do today. As climates cooled and landmasses shifted, those ranges contracted, leaving isolated populations and altering ecosystems in the process.

Fossils like this are therefore more than just relics of the past; they are chapters in the story of life’s constant flux. They record how species respond to environmental change and help us understand how today’s biodiversity came to be — and how it will continue to change in the future. Evolution is not something that happened once long ago; it is an ongoing process, written into the rocks beneath our feet.

And what is being revealed in the archaeology is a story far more magnificent and rewarding to understand than the implausible guesses of Bronze Age pastoralists who imagined themselves living on a demon-haunted, flat world beneath a solid dome holding back cosmic waters — a world in which everything was conjured into being by magic, without a past and with a predetermined future, just for them.

Advertisement

What Makes You So Special? From The Big Bang To You

How did you come to be here, now? This books takes you from the Big Bang to the evolution of modern humans and the history of human cultures, showing that science is an adventure of discovery and a source of limitless wonder, giving us richer and more rewarding appreciation of the phenomenal privilege of merely being alive and able to begin to understand it all.

Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It

This book explains why faith is a fallacy and serves no useful purpose other than providing an excuse for pretending to know things that are unknown. It also explains how losing faith liberates former sufferers from fear, delusion and the control of others, freeing them to see the world in a different light, to recognise the injustices that religions cause and to accept people for who they are, not which group they happened to be born in. A society based on atheist, Humanist principles would be a less divided, more inclusive, more peaceful society and one more appreciative of the one opportunity that life gives us to enjoy and wonder at the world we live in.

Amazon