New light on ancient history – Canterbury Museum’s Dr Paul Scofield inspects an earlier find, a moa bone. Photos: Canterbury Museum.
The recent discovery of fossils in a Waitomo cave casts new light on our ancient history and should serve as an alarm in our present.
While scientists unearthed fossils of previously unknown bird and frog species, their main aim was to research the impact of catastrophic ancient eruptions and rapid climate shifts.
“It’s definitely a wake-up call,” Dr Paul Scofield from Canterbury Museum told The News. “Next time Taupō goes bang, the central North Island is going to be devastated.
“The caves of the King Country are really important to understanding the impacts of changing climate and natural disasters on the New Zealand environment.”
Because the fossils were found between two layers of volcanic ash, from two eruptions 1.55 and one million years ago, they could be dated accurately. The more recent, massive eruption would have blanketed much of the North Island in metres of ash, Scofield said.
“We believe this was a major driver for the evolutionary diversification of birds and other fauna in the North Island.”
Lost world found – fossils discovered in a Waitomo cave prove creatures such as these once called New Zealand home. Image by Dr Paul Scofield, created using AI. Photos: Canterbury Museum.
The fossils suggest that one-third to one-half of New Zealand’s ancient species became extinct during the million years before people arrived.
Scientists, including Scofield, were following earlier work by Dr Trevor Worthy from Flinders University, Adelaide.
“It stemmed from work by Trevor in about the 1980s when he was surveying caves in the Waitomo region. He named the cave ‘Moa Eggshell Cave’ because he found a large amount of moa eggshell there.”
Worthy also identified evidence of the Taupō eruptions.
Backed by a government initiative, The Marsden Fund, the team returned to the cave, on private farmland near Te Anga Road.
“I was finding moa bones that were around 20–30,000 years old, but Trevor was digging at a much lower level when he found the older material,” Scofield said.
The new species include ancient ancestors of the Kākāpō and Takahē. One has been named after a much less ancient family.
“The landowner was so agreeable to us working there that we named a species after the Clayton-Greene family who have farmed in Waitomo for more than 100 years.”
The team’s research has now been published in scientific journal, Alcheringa.
“It casts a new light on a period largely absent from New Zealand’s fossil record,” said Scofield. “This isn’t a missing chapter in our ancient history, it’s a missing volume.”
There will be more chapters added to this volume.
“Apart from this little snippet, we still don’t have information from 15 million years ago, but we found 14 species of birds, so chances are there’s another 30–40 at the site,” Scofield said.
“There’s more information in that cave, sitting there waiting to be discovered. It’ll depend on funding, but we’ll be back there in the next few years.”
Meanwhile, the fossils won’t stray far from home, Scofield confirmed.
“All the material is going to be kept in long-term storage at Waitomo Museum.”
New light on ancient history – Canterbury Museum’s Dr Paul Scofield inspects an earlier find, a moa bone. Photos: Canterbury Museum.
