Simply when consultants thought they knew each moai on Rapa Nui, in any other case referred to as Easter Island, a dried-up lakebed saved them on their toes. These statues—largely made from a stone fashioned from volcanic ash and dirt known as—pepper the island, with greater than 1,000 already discovered and logged.

Discovering a brand new one got here as a shock. And a little bit of a thriller.

“We expect we all know all of the moai, however then a brand new one turns up, a brand new discovery, and on this case, within the lake, on the statue quarry,” Terry Hunt, professor of archeology on the College of Arizona, tells Good Morning America. “There have been no moai discovered within the dry mattress or in what was beforehand a lake, so it is a first.”

And it is probably not the final.

As the world undergoes drying, the lakebed in query has given up its moai. And this chance could happen once more. “Beneath the dry circumstances that we have now now, we could discover extra,” Hunt says. “They’ve been hidden by the tall reeds that develop within the lakebed and prospecting with one thing that may detect what’s underneath the bottom floor could inform us that there are actually extra moai within the lakebed sediments. When there’s one moai within the lake, there’s in all probability extra.”