THE STRANGE STORY OF ANIMAL LIFE IN NEW ZEALAND.

Forest and Bird, Issue 26, 1 March 1932, Page 2

THE STRANGE STORY OF ANIMAL LIFE IN NEW ZEALAND.

The isolation of New Zealand is unique. The seas around it are of vast depth and of proportionately great age. During the chalk period—before the great deposits and changes of the earth’s face which we assign to the Tertiary period—New Zealand consisted of a number of small scattered islands, which gradually, as the floor of the sea rose in that part of the world, became a continent stretching northward 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 northern hemisphere, and 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 change. 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 jaws, has sur-

vived only in New Zealand. Having received, as it were, a small cargo of birds and reptiles, but no hairy, warm-blooded quadruped. no mammal, New Zealand became at the end of the chalkperiod detached from the northern continent, and isolated, and has remained so ever since. Migratory birds from the north visited it, and at a late 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 becomes necessary to separate the whole land surface into two primary sections: ( a ) New Zealand, and ( b) the rest of the world.—Sir Ray Lankester in More Science from an Easy Chair.