After leaving Christchurch we made our way into the land of Lord of the Rings where strange creatures lurk (left) and lurked (right).
The skull is from a shark-toothed dolphin which lived about 25 million years ago.
This is the rest of its body.
All this area was underwater so there are lots of shells, whales and dolphins.
The rock is limestone which makes it a bit more difficult to excavate than the fossils in Drumheller.
The preservation is really good and you can see some cross sections of the bones.
They have found fossils of giant penguins in the area. Still not as big as Kerri though.
There were more Moa bones here although those are much younger from when the Maori had just come to the shores of New Zealand.
They also had cool rock concretions. These types of deposits form spheres that end up all over a couple of the beaches.
Here Kerri was hard at work excavating a fossilized shell. They have much different regulations on fossils here. It feels weird for them to just be given away.
