Scientists have been left baffled after a new statue emerged from the dirt of a dried-up lake on Easter Island.
The remote volcanic island is home to 1,000 mysterious giant stone heads, believed to be between 700 and 1000 years old, known as moai.
Each moai is believed to honour a person, typically a leader, and can measure up to 30 feet tall and weigh over 86,000 kilograms.
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Each moai is believed to honour a person, typically a leader, and can measure up to 30 feet tall
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University of Arizona professor of archaeology, Terry Hunt, said: "We think we know all the moai, but then a new one turns up, a new discovery, and in this case, it's in the lake, at the statue quarry.
"There have been no moai found in the dry lakebed before, so this is a first."
The statue is one of the smallest moai discovered to date, and its location on the lakebed is giving archaeologists hope that there may be more hiding in the reeds.
Salvador Atan Hito, Vice President of Ma'u Henua, the Indigenous group responsible for managing the national park, said that the discovery was "very, very important" to the islanders.
Its location on the lakebed is giving archaeologists hope that there may be more hiding in the reeds
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Hito said: "Because it's here in the lake and nobody knew it existed, even our ancestors, our grandparents didn't know about this one."
The Rapa Nui are the Indigenous Polynesian people of Easter Island, making up around 60 per cent of the island's population.
Hunt said: "Under the dry conditions that we have now, we may find more.
"They've been hidden by the tall reeds that grow in the lake bed, and prospecting with something that can detect what's under the ground surface may tell us that there are more moai in the lakebed sediments - when there's one moai in the lake, there's probably more."
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The Rapa Nui are the Indigenous Polynesian people of Easter Island, making up around 60% of the island's population
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Easter Island is one of the most isolated places on the planet, and it is for this reason that it is believed to be socially and culturally separate from the Pacific world.
The moai statues reinforce this isolation as they are totally unique to the island and believed to have been built between 1250 and 1500 AD.
Hunt and his colleagues have created a 981-strong inventory of moai over the past decade, showcasing the exact measurements and GPS coordinates for each one.
There is a concentration of moai remaining in a quarry close to the Rano Raraku volcanic crater, which is the same site where the new statue emerged.
Researchers believe that the island's indigenous people moved the moai by using ropes to rock and pivot the structures forward.
This method supposedly allowed the enormous stone structures to be moved around without the use of rollers or sleds.
Hunt typically used drones and phones to 3D image the unique statues.
The archaeologist is now exploring the possibility of utilising a ground-penetrating radar to detect more moai that could be hidden underground.