Paleontologists have found a 2.9cm long fossilized foot bone of a possible bowerbird species at the Miocene site of St Bathans in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Reconstruction of the life of the bowerbird St. Bathan (Ever lost thin). Image credit: Sasha Votyakova / Te Papa / CC BY 4.0.
The newly identified species inhabited New Zealand – far from its likely close relatives in Australia and New Guinea – during the Miocene epoch, between 19 and 14 million years ago.
“This discovery provides remarkable and unique insight into the biological history of Aotearoa's birds,” said Dr Nick Rowlens, director of the Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory.
“For many people in the world, bowerbirds are made famous by Sir David Attenborough's nature documentaries and their elaborate courtship behavior, where males build an arched structure called a bower, decorated with sticks and sometimes brightly colored objects such as fruit, leaves or even pieces of plastic, all in an attempt to attract a mate.”
Named Ever lost thinor the St. Bathans bowerbird, the new bird was much smaller than the living species of bowerbird.
“It is smaller than living and extinct bowerbirds, weighing 33g compared to 96-265g for other species,” Dr Rawlens said.
“Its foot bone is most similar to the alley bower builders, which include the brightly colored flame bowerbird and the satin bowerbird.”
“If this bird is indeed related to bowerbirds, it could represent a completely new family of songbirds for Aotearoa,” said Dr Elizabeth Steele, a researcher at the University of Cambridge.
“This is especially important given the limited understanding of ancient songbird fossils in this region.”
“The Saint Bathan's Bowerbird is the newest lineage of songbirds with a long evolutionary history in Aotearoa, with the oldest members of many different groups occurring here, including the Huia, Kokako, Tikeke, Piopio and Mohua.”
“It is likely that all of these species represent descendants of a rapid burst of evolution and dispersal from Australia to New Zealand.”
“Like some of the unique animals from St Bathan, there are no living descendants in Aotearoa.”
“The bowerbird would have been particularly susceptible to pre-Ice Age cooling and associated changes in forest composition and distribution, which likely contributed to its extinction,” Dr Rawlens said.
A paper about the opening Ever lost thin was published on October 7, 2025 in the magazine Historical Biology, International Journal of Paleobiology.
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Elizabeth M. Steele etc.. Possible early bowerbird from the Miocene of New Zealand. Historical biologypublished online October 7, 2025; doi: 10.1080/08912963.2025.2568099
