Tūhura Otago Museum’s dinosaur exhibit has been ranked the second-best in the world on TripAdvisor, with a 96.5% approval rating from visitors, in large part due to its Matakaea Shag Point plesiosaur fossil.
The fossil was found near Shag Point, which puts it within the Waitaki Whitestone Geopark, further enforcing the region’s reputation of geological significance.
Geopark volunteer Craig Jones worked on the plesiosaur when he was a research assistant for late University of Otago palaeontologist Emeritus Prof Ewan Fordyce.
He described the fossil as "quite an impressive beast".
It was discovered while Mr Jones was completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Otago.
Due to its size, it had to be cut into blocks so it could be transported back to the university.
That was where Mr Jones came in.
"My job was to cut away as much of that excess rock as possible so they could be moved more easily into position.
"What you see at Otago Museum is the thinned piece of block that I worked on."
Even after he removed the excess rock, Mr Jones believed the fossil still weighed "three or four tonnes, at least".
"I was quite fit after moving those rocks all day."
Mr Jones also began reassembling the blocks.
"It was quite a job to stick everything together because some bits were lost, because there was some crumbling at the edges.
"While we didn’t expect to get the whole thing assembled, we got a reasonable amount.
"At least three-quarters of the body, I never got on to the tail, and I got most of the neck and I did some preparation on the skull."
The skull was the most important part as there were barely any complete plesiosaur skulls in New Zealand, he said.
"One of our great taonga is our marine fossils. It’s almost as important as the marine mammals and marine birds."
Mr Jones was proud of his role in such an impressive fossil.
"Every day for a year, I worked intimately on that specimen.
"There’s still a lot of chips and bumps and probably annotations on the undersides of those blocks that I made.
"It is always a joy to go back and look at it."
After a long career with various scientific institutes, he is happy to have landed in Waitaki.
"This is the centre of New Zealand’s greatest fossil-collecting areas, so it was great to come back."
He has been volunteering with the geopark as a technical adviser.
"Much of material that [the geopark] is based on is stuff I collected during those few years with Ewan.
"I’ve worked at GNS Science for 16 years so I’ve got a pretty broad base of geoscience knowledge."
