Prehistoric Mystery In North Canterbury

Chronicle (Levin), 7 June 1949, Page 3

Prehistoric Mystery In North Canterbury

CHRISTCHURCH; June 3. Specimens of the Great What-Is-lt were shown by Dr. R. S. Allan to a meetiiLg of the Christchurch branch of , the Royal Society of New Zealand la3t , evening. Fpr something like 70,000,000. or 80,000,000 £ears they ^ have been ; waiting for someone to give them a ' name. No oue ean. In. the upper Cretaceous period, some 70,000,000 or 80,000,000 years ago, tne sea rolled over North Canterbury. The Waipara River has cut a gorge througn the rocks that'Were laid down on the bed of Jha-t aneieut sea, revealing the remains of many of the long-extinet creatures that lived in it, long before man appeared on the earth. For a time, the sea was, over that area, quite shallow, probably only 12ft or 14ft deep. During that period, the layer of soft rock called now the Waipara greensand, was laid down on the sea bed. Few fossils have been found in tius other than the Great What-IsTt, of which there are thousands of specimens. These look like slightly curved 1 tusks up to seven inehes long, cyiindrical in section* and tapering from one inch to less than half an inch in _diameter. In ,the thick end, there is a eonieal hollow, from which a fine ehannel runs to the other end. Otherwise, the whole thing is solid calcium carbonate, the stuff of which shelllish buiid their shells. Specimens haye been sent to England, to be passed from one specialist to another. The British Museum has confessed itself beaten. Eminent geologists attending the Pacilic Congress this year examined them, pondered over

-1— JL W* ii I them, scratehed heads over them, ana confessed that they could not offer • a clue. No thing remotely resembling these Waipara fossils had, they saia, ever been unearthed anywhere else. That the^ are the remains of some queer extinct form of life is regarded as indisputable, for they come in assorted sizes, from two inches long to seven or eight inehes long, and comparison oi the big ones with what may be presumed to be young ones indicates a regular pattern of growth. On the other hand, Dr. Allan, in his address last evening, traversed briei'iy every known group of living and ex-. tinct invertebrates,' and pointed oiit reasons against plaeing the Great What-IsTt in any one of them. There the story at present rests- — a geologieal puzzle preserved in the Waipara greensand for seores of millions of years, and still awaiting a solution.