While out fossil hunting today, I came across this large leopard seal napping in the sun. They are found on New Zealand beaches from time to time, and it's advised to give them a wide berth as they have rather large teeth! It is recommended that one goes no closer than 20m (60 ft) from them, I kept a bit further away just to be safe. Adults can grow up to 3.5m and I estimate this one was around 2 - 2.5m (6 - 8ft).

When we were having our lunch about 2 hours later, we saw it wake-up and start moving to the ocean in quite a weird way - almost like a caterpillar!

There is a database of leopard seals spotted in New Zealand so I made sure to get footage of both sides of it so that it can be identified as a specific individual and added to the database.