In 1999, a paleontologist named Richard Köhler spotted something extraordinary jutting from a cliff face above Waihere Bay on Pitt Island in New Zealand's Chatham Islands: a perfectly preserved, three-dimensionally mummified fossil fish embedded in stone nearly impossible to reach. So he walked 3 kilometers back to his lodging in Flowerpot Bay to fetch a ladder, then returned to carefully extract the specimen in several massive, unwieldy blocks. Twenty-six years later, that fossil would finally reveal the secrets locked within it—but only because of an unexpected gift.
The discovery mattered immediately. When Köhler brought the 1.2-meter specimen to the University of Otago's Department of Geology in Dunedin, Emeritus Professor Daphne Lee and the late Professor Ewan Fordyce recognized at once that they held something singular. "It was quite unlike any other fish fossil known from Aotearoa, New Zealand," Daphne recalls. The fossil preparator Andrew Grebneff spent painstaking hours revealing its anatomy: a tarpon, a large predatory fish that modern specimens swallow whole. This ancient tarpon, living some 55 million years ago in the Paleogene period, bore all the hallmarks of a top predator—an elongated body, thick rigid scales, a powerful tail fin, and a large upward-facing mouth designed for pursuit and feeding.
Yet despite its significance, the work stalled. When Professor Mike Gottfried, a fossil fish specialist from Michigan State University who had collaborated with Ewan on previous New Zealand studies, began investigating the specimen, he and his colleagues hit a wall: the critical geological information about where and how the fossil had been found was missing. Richard Köhler had passed away years earlier, and by the time Ewan died in November 2023, a draft paper remained incomplete. "Work on the study could not move forward because researchers lacked the detailed field information needed to properly document where and how the fossil had been found," the team explained.
The breakthrough arrived unexpectedly in early 2025. One of Richard's children, studying at Otago, visited the Department hoping to locate photographs of his father. After meeting with Daphne, the family made a generous decision: they donated Richard's field notebooks, including those from the original Pitt Island expedition. "This enabled us to get enough specific locality information to prepare a Fossil Record Form and to scientifically catalogue the fossil," Daphne says.
The completed study was recently published in the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics. Researchers determined that the fossil represents the first high-in-the-food-chain pursuit predatory bony fish from rocks of this age discovered in Aotearoa. They named it Ikawaihere koehleri in honor of Köhler and the location where it was found, with approval from Heidi Lanauze and the Hokotehi Moriori Trust. Mike Gottfried called it "a remarkable fossil" that "greatly expands our knowledge of the evolutionary history of tarpons, and it preserves unique and unusual features in exquisite 3D detail. It is certainly among the most important and impressive fossils recovered to date from Aotearoa, New Zealand." The missing notebooks had finally allowed science to complete its work—a reminder that discovery often requires not just brilliant paleontologists and fortunate finds, but also the grace of families willing to honor the legacies of those who came before.