NEWS BY MAIL.

Hokitika Guardian, 21 December 1923, Page 1

NEWS BY MAIL.

50,000,000-YEA US OLD FOSSILS COPENHAGEN. Get. 18

Al. Ltmze-Koch, the Danish explorer. who had a few weeks ago returned from a four years’ expedition in Northern Greenland, i.s exhibiting in the AJineralogical Museum here a wonderful collection, of 4,000 fossils and other prehistoric relics' obtained during his journeys in the far North.

In a tract- of sea-bottom in Washington land in N.AY. Greenland ho found tropical coral-reefs which, with a number of other fossils, testify to violent eruptions on the surface of the earth in the morning of time. .Measurements show that Greenland i.s still moving- li yards westwards every year. Many ol the finds are unique in geology. They date from a period of 50 to 400 million years ago. Koch has found articles from the Cambrian period hitherto unknown. Alost of the specimens in the collections from the Arctic Ocean have family connections in the Pacific Ocean, right down to the coast, of China. j Oil the Hunt holt glacier—the largest I glacier in the world, 70 miles broad—j he found in a layer of gravel some I strange wooden sticks sticking out of I the gravel, and There being no trees [ so far north, he and his Eskimos began digging anil found a Kayak! (canoe'. This Kayak must have he-j longed to one of the first inhabitants j of Greenland, who thousands of years j ago buried it- in order to protect it from the packing of the ice in the winter. The canoe contained mi me rolls finely made articles of whale and seal bone which the Eskimos of the present- day did not know at all. Among the objects were some peculiar knives of bone, with a round blade made from a meteoric stone.