Hurricane Fabian unearthed, and overturned many things, including extremely rare, fossilised bird prints more than 100,000 years old, recently discovered by researchers at Bermuda Aquarium, Museum & Zoo.

Aquarist Patrick Talbot was examining a damaged cliff-face after Fabian, at an undisclosed location, when an assistant suddenly noticed little tracks going up a sheet of rock exposed when a large chunk of cliff was torn away in the storm.

"My safety person saw them and thought they were bird prints," said Mr. Talbot. "I checked it out and they were definitely bird prints."

Mr. Talbot had no way of knowing how old the prints in the rock were, but he took photographs of them and gave it to the collections officer at the Aquarium.

"The day that I gave the photos to the collections officer, some Earth scientists were down in Bermuda," said Mr. Talbot. "One was a Swedish scientist, a paleo-ornithologist from the Division of Birds at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. called Storrs Olson. It was just coincidence that he was in Bermuda at the time."

Mr. Talbot said: "He said, 'I need to see this site'. I took him out and he examined it."

Samples of the stone were taken and Dr. Olson later determined its age.

He said footprints like this are rare because there are certain things that have to take place for them to form.

"An animal has to walk across a surface that the fossils can be formed in," Mr. Talbot said. "It has to be wet. The animal has to be heavy enough to leave a footprint. There is no solid object left behind but an impression which needs to set and then remain there to be covered by layers of dune or earth and then preserved. The substrate needs to dry. If it is windy or rainy, it can easily be washed away. Many other factors could influence the footprint's preservation also. The chances of a footprint being preserved is very rare."

But, for a brief moment 100,000 years ago, conditions were just right and a little bird walked across the sand, leaving his mark for all time.

"We are hoping to either cut the site out, or make a mould of it," said Mr. Talbot. "We haven't got that far yet. We hopefully will be able to preserve it because of the rarity."

Mr. Talbot said it is unknown what type of bird it was, but Dr. Olson could determine how tall it was, by measuring the span between the left and right print.

"It was a three-toed bird with, possibly, a toe in back," said Mr. Talbot. "His feet may have been webbed. We can't say what kind of bird it might have been because we really don't know a lot about animals that were living in Bermuda that long ago."

Dr. Olson is now planning to write a paper about the rare find.

Dr. Olson told the Royal Gazette, in a telephone interview, that the find is significant geologically rather than biologically.

"It is the geological environment in Bermuda that is not conducive to preserving trackways," Dr. Olson said. "This is a freak development. A bird walked across a sanddune after a rain, and the tracks were quickly buried. It is very unusual in the dune deposit environment that Bermuda has."

He said Bermuda sea levels at the time would be similar to present day sea levels.

"This is much later than the dinosaur period," he said. "Geologically, 100,000 years ago is quite recent."According to Natural History Museum curator Dr Wolfgang Sterrer, the Bermuda seamount was formed anywhere from 100 million to 33 million years ago.

"The prints were formed during the Pleistocene era, a period of frequent ice ages when sea levels would have gone up and down dramatically," he said. "Sometimes Bermuda would have been much larger than it is now, and other times it might have been almost entirely covered by water."

Dr. Olson said the bird was probably a shorebird, about a foot tall, similar to a willet, a large type of sandpiper.

"Willets are not really regular migrants, they are mainly in Bermuda in the fall, if I recall," he said. "They are casual visitors."

Dr. Olson has written more than 300 scientific papers, including several on Bermuda bird fossils and cave deposits.

"I have worked very closely with David Wingate, although he didn't have anything to do with this particular discovery," said Dr. Olson.

He plans to return to Bermuda in the spring for a conference on cave conservation.