
Kaiwhekea () is an extinct genus of plesiosaur from the Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian age) of what is now New Zealand.
Kaiwhekea () is an extinct genus of plesiosaur from the Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian age) of what is now New Zealand.
==History of discovery== thumb|left|Restoration The holotype was discovered in 1983 by Gary Raper, an amateur fossil collector, at the base of a cliff at Shag Point, Otago. It was later recovered by a team from the University of Otago's Geology department. The specimen was enclosed in a large concretion measuring metres long and weighing an estimated 10 tons. The block was split along natural seams and dragged out on a sledge (made from a car bonnet). The skeleton is mostly preserved as negative moulds as the mineralised bone was too fragile to be preserved.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).