Timaru woman finds rare moa bones during daily beach walk

A family is buzzing after a woman stumbled upon moa bones during her daily beach walk south of Timaru.Pippa Yates found what she suspected to be the bones of the now-extinct New Zealand bird at St Andrews Beach, which the South Canterbury Museum confirmed after closer inspection.Yates told Checkpoint the discovery was all the family could talk about.Supplied"Anytime we get a spare moment, we clean the bones that we've got. We've got probably a good half a bucket full of moa bones now, so they're seemingly coming up a lot better than we expected they would," she said."The museum said they'd crumble apart, so far we've got some really big pieces that have actually made it through being cleaned very carefully."Yates said the family were just using plain water to clean the bones to try and emulate natural washing on the beach.SuppliedShe said she's had to sacrifice her daughter's plastic basin previously used for cleaning baby bottles."We put a bit of cold water over the bones, which are sort of still within clay in big chunks, and swish the water over them from side to side, let them sit for an hour or more, and then drain the water out and start again, being careful not to lose any of the tiny bits of bone as well, so it's a slow process," Yates said.Yates said the family had been scaling the beach for about four years after hearing about a man finding a moa footprint and bones."I walk looking at my feet basically the entire time where we walk, specifically in all the clay banks, we always look in those areas thinking we might see a footprint, and that's something I can bring my daughter back to see," she said."We as a family have quite a collection of bones and oddities in our little bone cabinet at home, so we're quite familiar with the look of bone."The porosity of the bone, I could tell looking down on it that it looks sort of like a cross section of a bone as opposed to a piece of driftwood or something else stuck in the mud."Four-year-old Lucy.SuppliedYates' four-year-old daughter, Lucy, is part of an explorer club at the museum.She said she's been going ever since she could walk."She's obsessed with the museum, and she knows where everything is and likes to show anybody that comes to visit us where everything is in the museum," Yates said."So yes, she's got a keen interest on all those kinds of things. Her dad has got her quite interested in it as well, if we find skeletal remains of any kind, dead bird, on the beach, we bag it up and bring it home for dad to make it into a display for our bone cabinet."We have quite a lot of seagulls and all sorts of things in the bone cabinet."Yates said the family planned on keeping a few of the larger bones to possibly piece them together.She hoped to put it on display in their home for visitors."But any of the really obviously bone-looking bones, we're going to try and give back the museum, which will be nice to have on display," she said."Molly's my daughter who was on my front while we were walking on the beach. So, when she has children one day, she can go and say, 'this is the bones that mum and I found when I was just a baby on her front' and her children and her great grandchildren and those kinds of things."It's a legacy to have it on display, and any of the tiny little bits of we're going to put in specimen jars and bring them to the (kindergarten) and the school to have a look at as well."