The Lost World of the Moa

Forest and Bird, Issue 310, 1 November 2003, Page 8

The Lost World of the Moa

—GORDON ELL

he fascinating world of the moa, and its longgone contemporaries, is the subject of this learned tome. Tome, because of its 718 dense pages of text and tables; learned because, in both scholarship and style, it makes no concessions to the popular reader. Despite its populist and striking jacket, the authors’ vocabulary assumes a degree of scientific literacy, and preparedness to struggle through the jargon of academic zoology and paleontology. The gems are slowly revealed, however, in the descriptions of New Zealand’s vanished wildlife and what happened to it. Much of the earlier part of the book traces the discovery of moa and the progress of scientific description through nearly two centuries. Each contribution is picked over and analyzed as if it were a fragment of bone itself. Trevor Worthy and Richard Holdaway have been at the forefront of modern research, however, and it is their work in renewed moa "digs, and amid the bone deposits in caves, which has so expanded knowledge of our prehistoric birdlife. The results of this independent research forms the substance of the modern part of this book. Of particular interest, and much more readable, is the extensive treatment of other species from the time of moa. Their evolution and subsequent extinctions are traced in detail. Richard Holdaway is the author of the

i -_--e theory that Pacific rats were present in New Zealand 2000 years ago, and here the authors tell how 80 million years of isolation and evolution was ended by invading mammals, including latterly man, in only two millenia. The book is heavily illustrated including historic photographs of early research, and of bone assemblages. Sadly for a book of this significance (and price) the paper doesn’t always serve the half-tone images well. Nevertheless, the joint publishers have produced a significant volume which will surely become the starting point for any serious researcher, and an exhaustive reference for anyone interested in what became of our

prehistoric birds.

The Lost World of the Moa, Prehistoric Life in New Zealand, by Trevor H. Worthy and Richard N. Holdaway, principal photography by Rod Morris, Canterbury University Press in association with Indiana University Press, Christchurch 2002, RRP$169.50.