EARTH'S SURFACE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 250, 13 June 1932, Page 3

EARTH'S SURFACE

LAND AREAS "ONLY TWO DIVISIONS" SAYS A NOTED SOIENTIST. N.Z. AND REST OF WORLD. ■ "The isolation of New Zealand is unique. The seas around it are of | vast depth and of proportionately • 1 great age. During the chalk period | —before the great deposits and chan- I ges of the earth's face Which we as- f sign to the Tertiary period — New [ Zealand consisted of a number of small islands, which gradually, as the ; floor'of the sea rose in that part of the world, became a continent stretehing north ward and joining New Guinea. In that very ancient time the land was covered with ferns and large trees. Birds (as we now know them) had only lately come into existence .in the njorthern hemispheite, 1 and f when New Zealand for a time joined ; that area the birds, as well as a few |; lizards and one kind of frog, migrated ■ south and colonised the new land. "It is probable that the very peculiar lizard-like reptile of New Zealand — the tuatara or Sphenodon — entered its area at a still earlier stage of surface changes. That creature (only 20in long) is the only living representative of very remarkable extinct reptiles which lived in the area which now is England, and in fact, in all parts of the world, during the Triassic period, further, behind the chalk in date than the chalk is behind our own day. "For ages, this "type" with its peculiar beak-like paws, has survived only in New Zealand. Having received, as it were, a small cargo of birds and reptiles, but no hairy, warmblooded quadruped, no mammal, New Zealand became at the end of the chalk-period detached from the northern continent, and isolated, and has remained so ever since. Migratory birds from the north visited it, and at a later date two kinds of bats reached it and established themselves. "When we divide the land surfaces of the earth according to their history as indicated by the nature of their living fauna and flora and their 'geological structure, and the fossilised remains of their past inhabitants, it becolnes necessary to separate the whole land surface into two primary sections (a) New Zealand, and (b) the rest of the world." — Sir R. Lankes ter in "More Science from an Easy Chair."