The Fossils of New Zealand: Remnants of a Lost Continent

good morning everybody welcome to the fossils of New Zealand remnants of a lost continent as Francois has said my main background these days is as a primary teacher so unlike maybe some talks there might be a little bit more audience participation than you're used to I have been a paleontology not since I was well younger than I can remember this would be a picture of a little me I don't know what went wrong in between there and now but this is taken in the first year of the museum and again yes I worked at the Royal Tyrrell Museum for four summers both in the Education Department and the badland science camp and for those people who who know me yes I usually did walk around in the theropod death pose I also during this time invented my puppet character trauma door of the Taranis or who still has a strong internet presence the only reason I put him here at the beginning of the talk is for some of our pictures later on he will be a useful scale bar I forgot to take along my ruler so if you need a point of reference many of the photos include trauma door this is about how big he is compared to one of me here and finally I did work at the geology department of the University Oh unfortunately I couldn't take a picture myself so I got a picture of trauma door in my place and as you'll see shortly when I say fossil prepare this is actually a rather big deal in New Zealand we might take it for granted here start off with a quick geography lesson I'm not trying to insult anybody's intelligence but it's very important to know what we're talking about so here is the earth it is a nice round earth right here is New Zealand whew not very big however for people who are a little more student you might notice there's this big blue blob and that's going to be very important here at the very beginning of the talk in particular when it ties in to our lost continent but one of the interesting things I have discovered about New Zealand is it turns out a lot of people don't know a whole lot about the geologic place that is New Zealand and I've been on a personal crusade to fix Wikipedia because people will find out a lot about things like the paleontology but they don't bother to look up the geology in particular I was looking at a site about New Zealand mosasaurs and quote I forgot to put it in a slideshow but they said quote there are very few remains of dinosaurs found in New Zealand but marine remains are very common because of New Zealand's history is a volcanic archipelago wrong and I've been going through trying to fix that it's very very common in the verb paleontology pages to see people refer to it as a volcanic situation similar to say Hawaii up the Pacific New Zealand does fit into the Pacific Rim of fire however it is not a hot spot like many others so here is New Zealand a bit closer up compared to its neighbor Australia and these days very tiny New Zealand is just a tiny bit bigger than Alberta and landmass or Australia of course being a rather large continental country next-door but I'd like you to note this big blue blob once again once we get talking about you'll notice how it's actually just about half the size of Australia and this is something I think Kiwi should try to keep in mind when they're talking about how small they are compared to Australia so here is New Zealand up nice and close and this blue blob again for those of you who of course are adding one on one for my title this is the first hints we have of that lost continent that once was here instead of just this tiny island that is New Zealand Plus couple little islands here and there they're left over but from space you can definitely see that this blue blob has something to it this is actually very much like as you can see all the other continental bits this is actually a remnant of a tectonic plate I'll talk about that in a moment but before I do just give you a little bit of a history of hardness right not quite sorry I'm just gonna give you a quick geography lesson in New Zealand because once I get talking about New Zealand I'm probably going to fall in the habit of referring to where I was living so that was the center of modern New Zealand paleontology I didn't even know this when I moved there I went to go teach and actually more to the point to train to be a teacher the University I got into happen to have the only active vertebrate paleontology program in the country and that's right down here this is Dunedin New Zealand it's to give you a bit of context if you don't know your geography of New Zealand particular potential out here that's Christchurch that would be the place that was hit by that rather large earthquake a few months ago unfortunately but down here in Dunedin they were ok and I was based out of the University of Otago so this is very picturesque clock tower is what they use in all their promotion stuff for once it's the only time I can ever think of it the nice picture on the front row sure actually houses the geology Museum and New Zealand's paleontology program is pretty much connected this complex it's actually part of the building you see right there when I say the geology Museum this is it right here it's three stands of glass cabinets it could fit on the stage it's a very very small museum however what is very significant about this I don't have the picture here but if you remember back to my intro with the preparation lab this is the only proper fossil prep prep preparation lab in New Zealand that isn't private there's a couple of private citizens who prepare fossils this is the only government-funded one and the entire prep lab would fit on the stages as well so beginning right now you're gonna find that we here in Alberta are extremely spoiled when it comes to paleontology and fossils so at the University of Otago I was lucky enough to work with Ewan Fordyce he is New Zealand's only professional vertebrate paleontologist they have many invertebrate paleontologists but not very many vertebrate paleontologist in the sense that he is the only game in town they do have many masters and PhD students but unfortunately there's no jobs for them once they graduate they have to usually go to places like Australia or Argentina so oh this is supposed a New Zealand paleontology sorry I'm not going to cover all the paleontology a very quick brief history of paleontology in New Zealand they have actually had a lot of very big name historic figures in in the science come through so to start off with is this young gentleman here same I knew who that is Charles Darwin now Charles Darwin didn't actually do a lot of work in New Zealand but he did famously visit for nine days unfortunately if you were to read his journal account of it he wasn't very impressed but it to be fair to New Zealand he arrived right at the end of one of its bloodiest periods of history called the gun Wars where Europeans had been selling weapons to the indigenous Maori and the Mari had pretty much wiped each other out so when he arrived things were pretty much a demilitarized zone and pretty shabby he was only really impressed with the European ministry that he visited inland but we move on to this fellow here this is the only person in this slide that people may not know does anybody know who this is that's okay if we had a Kiwi in the crowd are there any Kiwis in the crowd actually before I keep going okay that's fine this is James Hector James Hector in New Zealand is a legend he was the first professional biologist bioscience person in the country so in addition to naming a lot of the extant animals they have for example New Zealand's indigenous dolphin bears his name so it's the Hector's dolphin but Hector also collected a lot of the first fossils he described a few of them but he sent most of them to England where we will know most of the people involved here such as this gentleman who does anybody know who this is yes Richard Owen the man who had coined the name dinosaur well one of his first famous comparative anatomy cases was on this rather large set of leg bones here from New Zealand this would turn out to be the giant flightless MOA and just based on this leg he was able to give a fairly accurate reconstruction if I recall correctly don't quote me on this but I think he even predicted that it would turn out to be her herbivore and he was correct the other person who received fossils from Hector was this gentleman right here who typically didn't get along with this gentleman here is anybody know who this is Thomas Huxley and Thomas Huxley has the honor of naming not only the first fossil penguin but it was a fossil penguin from New Zealand and as we'll see that's kind of their deal well coming back to New Zealand let's get to our lost continent so those gentlemen that I just listed in that last slide would have had no concept that what they were looking at was actually the remains of a continent at the time because of course plate tectonics hadn't been developed as a theory but these days of course we know all about it and I'm going to take you through that right now because that is where New Zealand's fossil record is quite interesting it tells us a great deal about the theory of plate tectonics but at the same time it actually leaves a few things to be wanted so to start off with 83 million years ago New Zealand was located just up here on the sides of what would be Antarctica and Australia so of course leading up to 83 million years ago the the southern continents had all been connected into a supercontinent gondwana which was the southern remnant of an even bigger supercontinent Pangea but throughout the Mesozoic the time of the dinosaurs that had been splitting up and typically when you hear about Guan wonna people will of course talk about its more famous components which are Africa South America Antarctica and Australia but to be really fair New Zealand should be mentioned in that list a lot of people neglect it but really should because as you can see it was a fairly sizable chunk of land at that point in fact as of its split up at 83 million years ago it has a different name we don't refer to it as New Zealand it is a continent known as Zealand and this is our lost continent and as time went on Zealander wandered off to the comparative east of the rest of Gondwana but actually stayed fairly south to start off with it was only just in the last 20 million years or so it started to drift north and as you'll see this drifting north ties in to why we even have a New Zealand at all anymore because at one point we didn't have much of anything in this particular area especially right here at 40 million years ago alright so to start off with 83 million years ago Gondwana should be here I didn't put it in this restoration I'm kind of a twit should have done that but here we have Zealander at its largest this was when it was biggest it was about half the size of Australia and as it split Zealander was in a very unfortunate tectonic position so to begin with before it was eel and ax before its lid off from guan wana during the Paleozoic so that's the time period before the dinosaurs this had just been a bunch of sediment on the bottom of the ocean with the breakup of Gondwana that Eastern Front of Gondwana started to push up on all the marine sediments off its eastern coastline and it eventually pushed it up and accumulated into a very thin amount of surface tectonic plate it made it into a very thin bit of continental rock however right through the middle here which ties into that bit with Christ is a tectonic boundary which is why New Zealand is prone to have earthquakes these days well back at this pay our point in time when Gondwana was splitting up those two plates are actually moving away from each other and that caused Zealand slowly to get stretched apart and as it stretched it was such thin continental crust that very much like Alberta did in the the mid or the the Late Cretaceous era submerged as this land spread out it was so thin it wound up getting submerged and so as of the KT boundary New Zealand was still pretty pretty substantial but once you get to 55 we're starting to lose it we're losing that oh boy 25 million years is a very important date this is the middle the old Gesine we're running out of New Zealand really quick it's spread to its its maximum width but as of 20 million years ago what happened was Australia shifted and started moving towards this plate boundary and so land started to get pushed back up and as of ten million years ago we get pretty close to what is modern New Zealand now five million years ago we start to get split up of the North Island from the South Island by the Cook Strait here which is a very substantial landmark by oh geographically these days and eventually we get right here and so right here along the South Island you can actually see that boundary quite clearly through the southern alps has off branches pretty much all throughout here so the entire country is prone to earthquakes and actually at fault keeps going up throughout here so here we are at what's left of New Zealand it's about 1/8 of its former size so unfortunately we lost one of the great continents of the Mesozoic but that's ok all right so knowing this Jeolla geologic history of the submergence of New Zealand what are some of the overall lessons we can learn from New Zealand so geologically speaking one of the biggest questions is back in the old Gesine at 25 million years ago when New Zealand submerged - its most submerged point how much of it was left and there's a very big debate going on between geologists and paleontologists as to whether New Zealand completely sank or some of it was left geologists point to the fact there are no terrestrial rocks from that time period and they claimed that it was completely submerged we're paleontologists as we'll see in a little bit have a little bit of evidence to show that not much New Zealand was left but there was probably a few islands that didn't quite get submerged but it does raise some interesting questions because what we do know about New Zealand comparatively in in the present is that it was the land of birds now this fella right here most people probably will know does anybody know what this giant bird here is called nobody shout it out shout it out wah wah the MOA is of course one of those famous giant flightless birds that unfortunately didn't survive past his contact with humans but that was only 1200 years ago so this could be considered a rather successful modern bird it just unfortunately didn't draw humans but New Zealand had many other interesting bit so this was the mega herbivore of the environment this guy right here Haste's eagle was the mega predator this was the largest bird of prey that we currently know of it had a wingspan of two meters but that doesn't actually give you an idea of how big this thing is its body was almost the size of an albatross so to give you an idea the torso of a hasty --gel is about one-third my torso these were very very huge birds of prey their wingspan was short though because they were adapted for flying through dense foliage which New Zealand is quite famous for as very dense forests and here they had two of them are together probably doing as they would have in real life with a terrace where in the background but here's the haste eagle and MOA not looking too happy about meeting up with this guy of course New Zealand is famous for a lot of other extant animals so of course the Kiwi bird is the national bird of New Zealand it's a very unusual flightless bird that actually is so specialized it has special whisker like feathers it has evolved for burrowing for its food in the ground of course New Zealand is also the home of the tuatara which is neither lizard nor any other type of reptiles kind of intermediary between the family that gave rise to snakes and lizards it has no living relative with which to compare it to New Zealand is also home of the Wetty which lent its name to the special effects company that Pierre Jackson uses they're very interesting cave-dwelling nocturnal insect this is the only photo I have of one unfortunately they're very hard to find so you have a trauma door for a sense of scale there but these things can actually grow this is a common a variety there's a species that dwells on the cave floor under rocks that gets to the size of a mouse and another type of bird that New Zealand is not famous for but I think it should be our it has many indigenous parrots well the key question we have is all these birds things like the tuatara and the Wetty which are both very clearly prehistoric because again tuataras go back into the Mesozoic but beyond New Zealand we don't really have a record of them in the Cenozoic Weta's have pretty much gone extinct or evolved into other things elsewhere in the world and of course New Zealand's birds there's no other ecosystem on earth where all the key Meaghan misha's are occupied by birds so the question is does New Zealand's modern wildlife oh this heritage to AG wand wanna heritage because of course it was attached to Gwon wanna it separated it was a continent it has not as far as we know had direct contact with the outside other continents because of course all the other continents have had biological invasions and reintroductions throughout the Cenozoic through continental connections and land bridges as far as we can tell New Zealand hasn't had that so the real question is was New Zealand a sort of moas arc ahead get it mo is arc yeah not my phrase I borrowed that but quickly I'm going to go through the the fossil record and see if that answers our question of a moas arc or not I'm going to rewind very quickly to Guana so this is kind of the baseline before New Zealand was Zealand or New Zealand and this is just going to be a really quick summary so before I jump into the whole fossil record I kind of glanced over invertebrates my apologies to anybody who's a big invertebrate fan I could tell you all about them New Zealand has a fantastic fossil record of things like gastropods that snails and those sorts of things they have clams brachiopods coral sponges kind of Durham's things like starfish and sea urchins but I didn't really cover those because frankly I don't know a lot about them and they're they're not as interesting but they have a very good record of that but for especially the vertebrate paleontology record we're gonna find out just how spoiled we are here in Alberta so remember you're spoiled okay so starting off in the Silurian we have some of New Zealand's very few trilobite this is a really tiny guy this is one of a handful of South sorry South Island trilobite with my headphone what-you-call-it plug-in for scale it's a very tiny trilobite they peculiarly do not have a lot of things like trilobite sand continents things that we think of Paleozoic fossils conodonts they have just increased the number of sites in the last two years I think they've tripled it but back if you read any of the books they only have about a half a dozen sites with kana Dawn's oil exploration has increased this a lot but they don't have a lot compared to us once we get into the Jurassic the fossil record gets a lot better both in marine and terrestrial so we get lots of nice and vertebrates like these shrimp we also get some of our first vertebrates so here's our first mystery vertebrate does anybody out there want to take a guess as to what this is I will give you a date it's from the Triassic South Island nobody oh my okay well this is part of an unidentified ichthyosaur and we get quite a few bits and pieces of them these are actually two separate jaws but they're pretty good for comparison you get an idea what you're looking at we also get vertebrae and actually James Hector who I mentioned back in the brief history supposedly sent a XTS or vertebrae that is on par with the shonisaurus we have here at the Tirol he found this back in 1872 we can't confirm this we have no reason to doubt him his notes were very good but we can't confirm it because the boat he sent it on sank unfortunately but there is a possible record of giant ichthyosaurs in New Zealand they also have no thesaurus and there is a tentative Plesiosaurus rai assic but hasn't been fully prepared or described so I can't really talk about it beyond that we get to our first major fossil site of New Zealand this one's world-famous this is curio bay so I lived right here and it was about a two hour drive south as you're about to find out this spot here in Dineen not only was I on the top of that University I'm I was rather fortunate I'm by 90% of the sights you're going to see here today so curio bay is a site just off the ocean here so the ocean extends if I could get my slide over here this is a Petrified Forest from the Jurassic so this was a former bottom of a Valley that had a volcano theoretically up I think it was up here it's either this direction or behind the camera I personally can't quite recall and it has some rather spectacular forest remains they have over six genus of plants I think they've got it narrowed down to something like ten or eleven different species and you get everything from these nice stumps to really long logs so this log here to give me an idea is about five meters long and that was just one of the more spectacular ones I could get in a photo there there was one that was about seven meters long lots of nice petrified wood and we get a shot here so this is actually the other cool thing well this this is the first time I ever went fossil hunting by the ocean but how many people can see the forest here see if you can count how many trees any guesses all the hands go down but how many people can see the trees sweet okay well here I'll help you out there are all the trees just in the foreground so ii ii ii ii ii don't go back so all these little stump things these are just the stumps the bottoms of trees so you get a really good idea of the layout of this particular force now unfortunately because this forest was buried by volcanic ash the volcano erupted covered it with volcanic ash terrestrial land animal remains are not gonna be found they would have been pulverized however there is some hope that at some point some of the layers in the the back wall so back here they're hoping that some of these layers might erode and at some point exposed trest real footprint but they have not yet been found but curio bay if you're in new zealand is definitely worth a stop it's quite awesome when you get there they're just everywhere in I mean all the stumps you see back here would be trees - all right so we're gonna jump ahead now to the Cretaceous in the Mesozoic the beginning of zealand at 83 million years ago so guan DeWanna was pretty much in this last gasps as of this point was he landed peeling off it was pretty much just Australia and Antarctica that were left and as of that point New Zealand again was about half the size of Australia and once it left one wanna theoretically all the animals that we find on it from there on in are going to be uniquely guano on Ian and or Zealander they're going to go on their own evolutionary path from this point forward so what are the critters that we have to take a look at so I'm just gonna catch up with myself so I'm gonna take you to one of the first significant fossil sites of the Cretaceous people who have a slightly gutter minded sense of humor get ready to giggle a little bit I give you shag point now just to put that in context shag is an alternative name for a cormorant bird and they are everywhere at this particular spot so again here I was in Dineen in just another hour and a half north as opposed to South we get to shag point now shag point is another one of these coastal exposures with these very high probably about 12 meter high cliffs at points near the Toronto door for reference but what we're interested in these giant nodules these giant concretions and they are a mudstone concretion and inside them you can often find vertebrate fossils but once you've found them the real trick is how do you get them out of there and how do you prepare them I was brought to this site by a local teacher who in addition to this I mean that's the scenery was spectacular but in addition to that there were all these mysterious bits on the ground which he thought were bones so the instant I got there obviously this is not a fossil boom because anyone would take a stab at what they are they're actually a fossil they are a trace fossil you want a guess as to what their a trace of there's no right or wrong answers absolutely shrimp burrow oh forget title there but they are indeed a shrimp burrow and they are everywhere and it actually has given the nickname to this place that's actually bone beach all the locals are under the assumption their bones because at this exact same spot we have a very diverse Mesozoic ecosystem oh girls including these large guys here these vertebrates and of course these guys here but we also get all the invertebrates these bela mites they're quite common in fact with these bela mites we have been able to index fossil this site i didn't write down the precise time my apologies but it was in the 75 million year range I think was 72 I can get you that date if you're really wanting to know but this particular plus the asourian reptile here is New Zealand's most complete vertebrate fossil and it was found a Chegg point and as you can see you can kind of see the outline of that concretion this is a panorama so I'm kind of standing right here so it kind of curves in the photo it's more straight and real-life it's a very large animal it's almost length of this beginning bit of the stage in between the stairs and this particular animals name kai-shek eeeh and I apologize in advance my Maori is not particularly fantastic but whenever you see a WH that's affa I'm not making that up my pronunciation is not that bad just the guy who transcribed the language came up with some weird sound letter combinations so kai-shek eeeh is a cryptic lighted Plescia sore but it's rather unique here's the skull it's a rather nicely preserved skull has over a hundred needle-like teeth clearly a squid eater in fact his name in Maori means eater of squid but when doctor for dice did the description and the analysis what he came to the conclusion of his calf ekia is a very primitive cryptic lighted it has much more in common with jurassic cryptic elided from europe than it does contemporary cryptic colliders that lived around Australia and Antarctica so when you compare him to the other cryptic lights we know of in the area he's rather primitive and we're not sure what's going on he does have some very derived traits from those primitive cryptic lines in particular he has a very large I or '''but and the question is whether he's diving down deep to catch cephalopods or whether this was an adaptation to deal with polar conditions which we'll get to here in a moment so here's Cathy and a reconstruction I did for dr. Ford ice eating a nice little belemnite but of course there were other plushie stores that have been found in New Zealand so this is maui soros this is one of these I like about New Zealand critters it's a long they're named after Maori mythological figures so Maui was a Maori demigod very similar Hercules and in legend one of his great tasks he did things like tame the Sun he tried to destroy death but one of the other ones that he's famous for is he went out fishing with his brothers in the region of the ocean nobody had ever been to before and when he went fishing his brother we're just catching fish when he threw in his line he pulled up a fish so big it would become an island and he supposedly with this fish created the North Island of New Zealand so he got his own place or named after him it's actually analyzed in the store but interestingly it's only really known from the rear I'm sorry from the torso so it cuts off at about the neck we have a couple vertebra that have been assigned to Maui source there's some contention on that but as we'll see in a moment there's there's a question as to whether another lies masoor from New Zealand is actually the same animals Maui source but we'll get to that in just one moment and of course the other thing we find with these plushies source we find lots of gastroliths and I won't go into the the controversies there there's a lot of questions as to what fleshy source we're doing with these gaster lists whether they're for buoyancy or helping digestion New Zealand hasn't exactly helped solve this problem but we do have samples of gastro lists for people to study if they're looking for a more large sample base now all these plushies stores of course had other things in the water they need to worry about one of them being these guys right here who my favorite group of marine reptiles the mosasaurs however I'm aware that I have a one of the guys who has started off the mosasaur renaissance so I'm aware of the fact my picture here is very out of date I did this to be kind of like a monitor lizard with flippers but I'll rectify that in a moment for you but yes a checkpoint we have this column a neck vertebrae from almost a sore that's all we don't know what kind of most assorted specifically we're living at shag point and the big problem there is those big nodules from before so you have to have a nodule that erodes enough that you can find the bone but hasn't eroded enough that the bone is all gone so this particular one was a boulder about the size of a basketball that broken open they I think it was this end they saw so they prepared it they got these neck vertebrae but for other problem is the locals didn't like the removals that Plescia sore and they have kind of requested that people don't remove fossils anymore because it caused a lot of damage but from elsewhere on the South Island a bit further north by christchurch we also get my favourite of all time kennefa soros tan Aoife is a maori word for basically mythological monsters and pretty much every area had about a dozen of the monsters i could tell you lots of stories they are my favourite but i just love the fact that mosasaur got named after them and this particular group is turning out to be a lot more cosmopolitan than I had originally been aware of with new species being described in Antarctica and Japan now which raises the question they also have so tiny Foss Soros is a tile asourian but they also have a describe species that's currently considered to be a species of tylosaurus and even before I found about TANF a source in other places I was personally wondering if that Tyla source would turn out to be TANF a source there may be a strong case for that but because I knew I'd have one of the people who are revolutionising our view of most of Soros I threw in this bonus slide he doesn't even know about of a new restoration of TANF ah Soros eating one of the common invertebrates ammonites although as I'm sure he'll tell you they probably do need ammonites it was the only thing I had to throw in the pitcher at fast notice we also have non tieless or most stores we have lots of species of pronated on new zealand has three described species to describe species and possibly to new ones coming down the the pipe so we have this one from up by christchurch and then we have this new species discovered just outside of Otago this particular guys from a locality that is a marine KT boundary this is the lower jaw both sides of it they actually have the skull it's just currently in another one of these large concretions so let's the other problem that New Zealand has going for it most of his specimens are in these giant concretions that are both hard to collect prepare and find in the first place but once he's fully prepared and hopefully the next decade we'll have another idea of another new program if they don't but what's also neat about this is this is a clear record of most of swords being present in Zealand just before the extinction of the dinosaurs and the mosasaurs and at that same site there's no evidence of Mosasaurus afterwards that doesn't hold over for all of our reptiles as you'll see in a moment other things we get here of course those metal Knights I mentioned we also get things like bivalves camera with that one there is and now we're gonna jump up to the North Island this is one of our few fossil localities we're going to talk about North Island part of that's because lots of stuff is down here in the southern half of the southern island and I actually just know it better because I lived there of course but this particular site is famous not only in New Zealand but to an extent it's world-famous if you were living in the police 70s and 80s and paying attention to southern hemisphere paleontology this is Toki Valley and the Touhey Valley was is a very interesting site because this is a fossil locality dense forest in fact it looks like something that a dinosaur could have lived in one thing this photograph does not give you an idea of is this dense wall of vegetation is growing on a cliff in this entire River Valley you have to basically find a spot kind of off the distance you see how this slopes down you're going down something along the line of 30 degrees elevation very bush like lots of moss it's not very solid ground and you get a lots of mosses you'll slip it's very hard to get to so the fossils you're looking for in these big boulders in the river now I didn't get this photo the exact spot we're gonna be talking about a moment this is about 20 kilometers south of there I didn't I wasn't able to access the spot because it's not well marked on a map and it's on private property anyway and the official saying around town is don't ask because you won't be allowed but this area was worked by an amateur paleontologist Joan Witten who sadly passed away in 2009 and she is known as New Zealand's dragon lady and she's a very interesting character in the 1970s her husband was taking an amateur geology class because they'd like to collect rocks and minerals but he was sick and so she went into the class on paleontology and she got hooked so she started to look at maps of her local area and she discovered that the towhee valley had been marked by one of Hector's original fueled workers as contained the bones asourian's so she started working in the 1970s and she came up with lots and lots of marine reptiles so one of her first ones was this one Tyrannosaurus that's another elasmosaurus just means in Malory large this is large reptile just in in Malory interestingly Tyrannosaurus and elasmosaurus only known from skull material and there's a lot of people who are starting to question because it's of a comparable age to the rocks that maui source on the South Island is found it's a question as to whether the two are the same animal I can't say but hopefully future discoveries will shed some light on that she's also discovered some formosa sores on the North Island this is reka source it's a very interesting intermediary species between some primitive mosasaurs and proper mosasaur s and it's a it's a cool specimen she also has her own speed she's of pronated on this is named after I believe in northern hemisphere species that's what it's currently described as it may be reclassified later on but the other thing that she found so this deposit in the Touhey Valley is a marine deposit it's in the shallow estuary or Lagoon but she also found some other bones oh sorry in addition to things like this giant ammonite now unfortunately I don't have a reference for you this is about 6 feet in diameter it's a pretty big guy Late Cretaceous ammonite but she also found the most prized of storyand fossils depend on who you ask what'd she find no he's gonna guess she found marine reptiles and with them she found other reptile bones that based on effect I'm differentiating them or not marine dinosaurs hey now here comes the next audience-participation moment here's where you find out just how spoiled you are how many dinosaurs do you think they have found in New Zealand Oh some good guesses well we have found approximately seven types from 9 bones this is New Zealand's dinosaurs all of them so I was going down there and I was talking people at dinosaurs and nobody I've talked to has found one and actually that changed while I was there they have now an unconfirmed dinosaur from the South I know she's exciting but these are all northern Island dinosaurs and this is pretty much all the - two bones so when we take a look at them one of these bones is kind of a cheater so this little tiny phalange or finger bone is from a Jurassic dinosaur from on the North Island it's probably a slower sword but that's all they could really tell you for now so it's a Jurassic dinosaur but every other dinosaur bone I'm about to talk about in this particular segment is from that Touhey Valley site so it's a marine deposit Late Cretaceous it is 75 million years ago so these are all New Zealand the dinosaurs and not guan Duany and this one is guan yin these guys are now removed from Guan wana for about ten million years so they have followed their own evolutionary trajectory so theoretically we could probably give them their own geniuses if we had something a little more well recognizable so right here is the first dinosaur bone ever found in New Zealand it is the tailbone off of a theropod which I have reconstructed here one of the other dinosaurs that we found some sort of hip Salaf a daunted like ornithopod we're not sure if it's a hip salafi daunted or just something that resembles one anybody who has questions about that similar to the controversy going on with australian hips lafa daunted like dinosaurs I've reconstructed this guy as a cart our safari at Caracara daunted sword but if you read books in New Zealand they'll tell you this is something like a Megalosaurus or analysis or and that's mostly because the the key book written on New Zealand dinosaurs is by Geoffrey Cox it's out of print was written in 1990 before we really understood southern hemisphere theropods so that the theropods are about to talk to today are probably not remnants of a primitive Alice or mango sore they're probably a carrot carrot onto the sore or an ala beena sore but we also have bits and pieces here's that hip Slava daunted femur here we also have a chunk of a sauropod rib now this rib is very uncharacteristic but sense I took these photos about six months later they described the vertebrae from the tail of a titanosaur so we're able to confirm much like those theropods that our southern hemisphere sauropods carry on this is a reconstruction for me my friend Peter bond who used to work at Museum as well of a Titanic source we also have a confirmed tail bone from one of them we don't know what type but we know they're titanosaurs which is kind of exciting we also have bits and pieces here of an in Kyllo store which is kind of cool and I'm told the reason you can tell us an ankylosaur is the way that it has this kind of shelf like bit to hold up the armor it has a at moment similarity to the Australian ink house or mini-me which is what Peter bond has reconstructing them as here we don't have enough of any of these critters so the majority of our dinosaurs we only have one piece of the same kylus or they are fortunate enough to have two diagnostic bits they have that rib and a corresponding chunk of the hip bone but they don't have anything enough to describe these even to a specific family that alone genus or species so again we're very spoiled however these dinosaurs from New Zealand have popped up in literature but before we get there sorry I forgot about this guy we also have this little tiny piece of a pterosaur it's a piece of the shoulder bone which is kind of cool when there's pterosaurs there they actually have two of these shoulder bones from probably the same pterosaur they're pretty much identical just one about this length in comparison that one that bone if you're wondering is about the length of your average index your middle finger we're not exactly sure what kind of pterosaur they've reconstructed it here's a similar species to one in South America who knows at this point but our New Zealand dinosaurs have a connection to guys from here hey who knows these specimens we have Edmontosaurus and rhinosaurus and this was kind of neat so and I believe it was 2008 or early 2009 both Phil Bell and Eric Snively from the University of Alberta put out our paper about polar dinosaur migration which mostly talked about edmontosaurus and rhino source but they also mentioned New Zealand dinosaurs and the reason that they did this was back in the Mesozoic of course zealand ax was one of these places where it was completely cut off and if you actually take a look this circle right here that's right Suzie Linda most Atlanta was polar it was in the South Pole so the ongoing theory had been polar dinosaurs were migrating at least in North America they go up from they go up to Alaska for the summer and then they come back down to somewhere along the lines of Alberta where it was warmer in the winter this study was trying to disprove that so what they came to the conclusion was Edmontosaurus and pachyrhinosaurs the bigger animals in Alaska could theoretically make that journey but the smaller things like Troodon and the hips alofa daunted they had their couldn't make the journey but clearly based on the fact we had dinosaurs from the separation down here in Z Landa these dinosaurs were surviving just fine I mean a nicer than Antarctica and Australia theoretically could be migrating this way and very unlikely with the distance but there was definitive proof was Ilan de that there were dinosaurs successfully surviving in a polar environment where they could not migrate they were stuck they had to they had to stick around so that was kind of cool but the really cool dinosaur discoveries way off coast here so I haven't been here but this is the Chatham Islands and in the 2000s I believe 2002 they published the discovery of some theropod finger bones now this is a really interesting site so the official publication has these as being about 80 million years old so they were borderline quand wana Zealander but the deposit therein is actually seen as zoic it's from about 61 million years ago what's interesting is they had interpreted this when they first found it you just found the one deposit with these pteropod bones and they interpreted it as a seen as a Mesozoic layered that had eroded these bones had fallen out and then been reburied in the scene azoic so it was just a reworked layer however field trips are sorry field crews after this on the same island found multiple outcrops of the same formation and have found more dinosaur bones there is some evidence to suggest it's a bone bed meaning we might I emphasize might have the first post KT dinosaur and this kind of makes sense when you think about it because the dinosaurs in Z Landa were adapted for polar conditions so if an asteroid smacked into the earth well Z Landa when you take a look back well South America is just on the other side of the globe here it would have shielded zealander from any direct damage from that asteroid so the only thing I would have to deal with is that post-impact radioactive winter as it were the cloud of dust that would have blocked out the Sun to these dinosaurs as long as that was a fairly short term thing a year couple years maybe in five years that would have just been a bad stretch of time they would have been adapted to survive so it makes sense that we might be finding some dinosaurs there this has not yet been confirmed in the literature anybody who's interested you can contact Steve Morton in Australia he's the one in charge of this I'm not sure if they're there they're working on or not but give him a shout see what he has to tell you but that kind of brings to a conclusion the Mesozoic the KT boundary dinosaurs and marine reptiles fairly well well that brings us to the end of the Z lambda period so of course the island is separated from Wanda Wanda 83 million years ago the end of Zeeland of the continent came at about 25 million years ago was that submergence there wasn't much of a New Zealand left unfortunately we don't have much of a terrestrial fossil record in fact we have none have a fantastic fossil record from the shallow sea surrounding Z Landa and it was home to some fantastic critters but the other cool thing is the rocks this is a time period where tons of limestone was deposited because that shallow sea was very very productive so some of New Zealand's big big tourism landmarks these are all geologic sites I'd been to oh their heritage to this this limestone of the unique erosional characteristics that it has can't do that anyways so these come our sorry one of the most famous sites is the murray key boulders which are just a little bit north of dunedin here they're about an hour north and when you get to them well these are them here to give you a sense of scale here's a person here's a boulder new zealand tourism when they photograph it photographic like this and they give you the impression these things are huge well the biggest one is about two and a half meters in diameter but they're actually really cool they're actually a form of fossil funny enough not really a big one the fossils not this big so if you take a look on the inside what this would have originally been is a tiny little snail shell and due to the volcanic activity just going on theoretically on terrestrial New Zealand ash that mixed with the water had a chemical reaction with that shell which caused this gold calcite stuff to form which then glued the surrounding sand and you've got these perfect spherical boulders out of the process so very neat kind of fossil in a sense but if you're in the area I definitely suggest checking them out just keep in mind they're not as big as the photos typically make them look okay now we get to New Zealand's one famous site for paleontology and this is the Waikiki Valley this is kind of their equivalent of dinosaur Provincial Park and so when you head to the area it's nothing but pristine outcrops of limestone and their equivalent of the foothills leading up to the southern alps and there are some very cool things to be found here this is probably the most famous of sites this is one I've worked twice in fieldwork with the University this is earthquake so Tago and the reasons called earthquakes is originally when it was found by the locals they thought that this outcrop was caused by earthquakes it's not it's just erosional but large sections of this hill collapse so after my photograph here there was a section not this specific one but a section like this just off the picture here that actually was in one of the the field trips the first field trips photos and then it had collapsed by the time I arrived very dangerous to work at in rain you're not allowed to go there but the things that we find they're still scary in the water and they're not most of swords anymore we get the mammal equivalent the whales so we have quite a nice cross-section of these shark tooth dolphins they're called and I skip a slide no we did not cool so this one is a noose koala daunted it does not have a name as of yet it's in the process of being described this skull is about two meters long or not two meters for a meter and a half so it's about four feet long pretty big critter this little guy here what patita is the skull is about that big he's a cute little dolphin would have been about the same size as something like a common dolphin or a Pacific white-sided dolphin but these things were probably pretty terrifying to the mid-size to smaller sized critters that they are living with I like to call them the orcas of the Ola Gesine and the reason that they're called a shark tooth dolphin as their teeth here so what's neat about these scuola Dawn's or shark tooth dolphins is they're kind of the next step of whale evolution that you don't hear about so when you hear the stories of course we all are pretty familiar with terrestrial animals going in the water losing their rear limbs growing tails and fins they grow into something like the serpentine like bacillus source or Zora dawn well New Zealand's actually where those serpentine type whales wane out and we start to get things like these guys so they still have the differentiated teeth because whales today of course as they have teeth have teeth that are the same throughout their entire mouth these guys still have differentiated dentition so the front teeth are very very spike tusks like things they're basically just for impaling prey but these back teeth are very shark like and they're what they probably would have shared their food with scuola Don's overall we're not a very successful family long-term they would go extinct about 15 million years after they show up however they do have an awful family that's still successful today those are river dolphins they're very closely related and you can kind of see that with the elongated snout and the lower eye down here but New Zealand is kind of one of the big mecca's of old Gesine whales and I'll talk about why that diversity pops up here in a second but these are all whales found around Otago these are this one and this one are the actual specimen this one I understand is a specimen of an American bottlenose whale however they have an equivalent New Zealand one I just threw it in I didn't realize it wasn't New Zealand at the time but basically for every one of these casts no matter whether their origin is whether they're American or not they they can match it in New Zealand we also get disarticulated whales so a lot of the time we just get skulls the reason why is that limestone do the setups like earthquakes where it's very tall walls for the the deposits they don't want to go excavating too far in the hills because you can't bring down the the overburden safely because you'll bring down half the hill so often they just grab the skull when they can because the postcranial on these early tooth whales is not as important as the skull anyways but occasionally they're lucky and they get disarticulated remains really get a lot of post cranial stuff the other cool thing they get is they get some of the very first baleen whales they actually have a fossil record of the transitionary to and baleen whale I couldn't find a specimen though so I don't have a photo of it but a lot of these photos you're going to notice is another baleen whale don't have names it's not that I'm lazy they don't have names they have so many of these whales coming up in the last 20 years they have been able to keep up with the descriptions because again dr. four-by-four dice is really the only game in town and his grad students so here's another baleen whale with the lower jaw down here and this is the upper skull okay so I'm gonna get to these penguins in a moment some reason ever repeated this piece of art but wire there's so many different whales well what is very interesting is alanda ties into the greatest story of Gondwana breaking up so as you recall what I said is at the end of the Mesozoic the only parts like Wanda Wanda that are still attached where Australia and Antarctica well the instant those two split up because they were the last real land barrier in the South southern ocean when they split up a giant circum global current popped up and that's still going today well this would have turned up huge amounts of nutrients and caused a whole new ecosystem to pop a path will pop up in the Cenozoic that had never been seen before and New Zealand's whale record actually ties in with this rather whoops it's at that exact same time we see the diversification of these shark-tooth dolphins and baleen whales what we think we see is the Southern Ocean is pushing Whale diversity and evolution to a level that we've never seen before or since so when we look at baleen whales today they're all just derived from one family most of the baleen whales I just showed you are extinct forms they don't have living relatives today only one the Kells I might be mispronouncing that but anyways all modern baleen whales derive from one surviving element whale diversity was way more back at this stage and then it ever has been before or since now penguins is New Zealand's direct claim to fame they have more of them than anywhere else in the world you can take the the next two leading countries which I believe are South America and Antarctica and they still don't match New Zealand's penguin fossil finds so we get them in every state as disarticulated as you'll see from my quick field trip story but we also get articulated complete ones and this is a extant blue penguin beside it here this is the fossil penguin here and what's kind of neat about penguins in fossil penguins in New Zealand is they have kind of revolutionized our view of penguin evolution but I'm going to get to that for the conclusion of my talk we also have other marine animals including this mystery animal here does anybody want to venture what this is this is a slide directed at dr. Brinkman does anyone take a guess it is a turtle it's specifically from a fossil leatherback turtle so those are little shell fragments from a guy very similar to this this is the point where I'm trying to cater to my my audience has it work we also get the large build bird I don't even want to print out that but pseudo d'entre strut yeah these are birds that had a bill that had serrations built into the actual beak that aren't teeth but they they look and function just like teeth and they they got quite big the ones in New Zealand were kind of mid-sized and they're not as cool say the one that I believe wasn't proved they just found one they also get lots of cool fish including this moon fish to give you an idea this is about 3 meters long you could lie down and it's still longer you'd be about as long as these two slabs here and it goes on it for a third we also get sharks of every size shape and description they have lots and lots of fossil shark teeth and actually some nice complete ones with things like the vertebrae and the teeth mixed in throughout here sometimes the teeth and there's a vertebrae this is from a very very large ancestor of the great white shark he's about only about a metre longer but he weighed about four tons it was a very massive thing and it was probably eating those shark tooth dolphins and other whales that were rapidly evolving around it it wasn't on the size of say Megalodon but they do get make it lived on down there and it's actually this particular great white shark is become a real centerpiece in the argument as to whether Megalodon is related to great white sharks or is its own kind of subfamily of sharks and based on just even what I saw the teeth on this guy and the Megalodon teeth we find on the southern island I would be in the boat that Megalodon is its own thing they don't look quite the same we also get some of the best preserved Nautilus ancestors in the Oligocene not to say these are the first Nautilus fossils ever but they're very very nice for that time period and now we're going to get to kind of New Zealand's version of the Royal tutorial Museum so this is in Duntroon Otago this is New Zealand's only museum dedicated exclusively to the science of paleontology the vanished world center and does anybody want to take a guess as to how large its gallery is no it's about twice the size of the stage here it's not very big and so this showcases a lot of old you seen stuff I mentioned it has a little bit here think in that case a little bit about shag point but for the most part is talking about the the white Tiki Valley and all the the whales and penguins and ARC's and all the stuff we just took a look at so kind of jumping from this I mean the same way that you can step outside the museum to fossil hunt I thought I'd take you to a site just about half an hour away from the vanished world sat in the center and it's just a limestone quarry I'm a really bad person I forgot to write down the name of this limestone quarry but there are dozens of them in operation around the area and New Zealand is actually famous for the limestone you get out of here it's called Amaru limestone just named after a city on the coast but a lot of the old Victorian era buildings in New Zealand are made out of it and even actually buildings as far north as I understand Florida are made out of it and they're still actively mined it today and so this is us working just on this upper cliff you see up here just on the the top of the quarry is where we actually ended up we did survey down at the bottom but the only thing really worth checking out was the slag heaps but once we got up top here we made some rather cool discoveries one of them was by me alright so I thought I was doing pretty good in Alberta I have only ever found you know isolated elements here I found associated disarticulated penguin vertebrae and two ribs oh I thought I was doing fantastic until doctor Fordyce found a articulated set of hips and one of the girls found not only vertebrae and ribs but two scapula included with hers but that tells you how plentiful the Penguins are we did we found all these within the course of an hour what's also cool is how they get them out of the ground so dr. Fordyce is the only vertebrate paleontologist in New Zealand currently he also employs as far as we're aware the only professional government employed technician so between the two of them they can't really excavate things efficiently on their own if they use the techniques we do so they kind of cheat a little bit when they do things like pedestal een and excavation so when we found that penguin or those penguins we had about two hours left dr. Fordyce took a look at this watch and said oh we got about two hours I will get them out of the ground right now and I was sitting there going how we're getting things out of the ground I expected we'd have to come back you know a few times over the course of a few a few weeks but he pops into his truck puts on his orange coveralls and pulls out a chain saw this is how he works you can kind of see it here in the ground so what he does is he cuts an initial square around our specimen and then what he does is he kind of makes a tic-tac-toe pattern around that that outside tic-tac-toe is your pedestal and trench so he takes out the the squares on the outside to give you your instantaneous trench and you have an instantaneous pedestal well at this stage if you need to put a field acket on it you can however remember that this limestone that we're working in is used to make buildings and all the quarry men do this is where he got the idea you watch quarry man do it the quarry man just cut the stone out in the same format with the chains on it stays put you know to the point where you can put it in the building is a nice brick so they don't normally have to feel jacket if they do you can put it on and then all you have to do is cut the bottom out and tada you have a nice block with fossil in it so remember that was the end of zeal and uh now we're getting into the period where New Zealand the island is starting to get pushed back up so Zealander was continuously sinking throughout its history and then at about twenty-five million years ago it hit the maximum extent of sinking and then the tectonic plate shifted so now New Zealand is getting pushed out of the ocean as a kind of a mountainous chain what fossils do we find well this is where Central Otago so this is a little bit south of where we were just looking but kind of in the same general area I forgot to put the specific name of the town but this is a funny deposit of fossils I I found completely by accident so I was taking my fiance's father around for a wine tasting throughout Central Otago it's a great vineyard area we drove by this hill covered in shale and I bought the car to a screeching halt he was very confused well I had attended a talk by one of the palynology sat the Museu the Otago University and she had had a slide of at least a site that looked very identical telling everybody this was the only fossil site you would find in this particular area of Otago well I hit the brakes thinking hey did I just find the only fossil outcrop in the area so I forced him to get out of the car and they were both him and my fiance were rather grumpy they thought I was just imagining things I picked up a rock oh no oh sorry the come back to that moment I picked up a rock Dada fossil leaves so I was feeling pretty good about myself that day it was pretty awesome and there their jaws just dropped but what this is this is the remnants so this is 16 to 18 million years ago this is the remnants of a rather large lake network that we know existed in fact it and this picture I have reconstructed this kind of a couple big lakes with interconnecting rivers and swamps and stuff there's a chance that it is actually one giant continuous lake the reason we say that is in modern-day New Zealand on the North Island if you take a look there's a very large lake you can still you can see on the map Lake Tahoe which is basically just a remnant of a volcano that blew up so look giant crater is now a giant lake there's a chance this may have been one such lake but in here we find really nice fossil remains of plants which is very key in our study of the Palin ology of New Zealand because it gives us of course the the macro fossil to line up with the micro fossils that we're finding but we also find cool things like Kiwis popping up and moas and some of our moas now this is jumping ahead a bit some of our mowers are so nicely preserved I should put this towards the end of the show but sorry you get modern mola remains so that helped us study that the prehistoric ones they even have mummified remains this guy would have probably been shout upon by a hasty eagle just before the Mallory showed up twelve hundred years ago so this this particular one is prob about five thousand years old anyways back at our lake deposit we find fossils of New Zealand's native water Wren the pock echo which is a fun name to say they're very pretty birds but in this lake network we get some really interesting fossils that you would not expect so in modern-day New Zealand the reptiles you find our lizards so you'll find geckos and skinks but there are no snakes and there are no oh so a national sorry you also find the tuatara so here's a fossil tuatara but you would not expect to find a crocodile but yet this Lake Network had one and so this is about to kick off the last part of my talk so we have a crocodile from 16 million years ago in New Zealand there are no modern crocodiles now the question is this crocodile from Guang Guang wanna descendant or did he come from somewhere else like say maybe nearby Australia so that's the last part of this talk is taking that fossil record going from Zealander breaking off from Gwon wanna taking possibly all these critters that descend directly from gwaan wanna and we try to sink them and around them and then we push them back up the question is did New Zealand completely submerge or did parts of it survive so we have direct descendants of Gondwana Hamoui zark as it were well to give you a bit of a background on how contentious this issue was that same talk that I attended by that paleontologist actually had a Staedtler Waldorf heckler pair in it we had two geologists who are heckling the whole time because she was contending that New Zealand had a few Islands left in it and it actually at one point erupted into a yelling match between her on stage and the people in the crowd before the University basically asked the two of them to be quiet or get out but it's it's a pretty heated debate the paleontological evidence is you're gonna see it probably didn't entirely sink but there's some compelling evidence that at the same point despite the fact we have a bit of a moas art going some things actually made it into New Zealand from the outside because of course here we're looking at what does this isolation as an island mean for evolution the idea being that if we cut you off in the middle of nowhere with no contact with anywhere else your animals should be nice and nurse or your animals and plants should be nice and contained they aren't going to have any gene flow or competition for them outside critters unless you get a direct connection and we do not believe New Zealand had that okay well one of the strong bits this palynology stood kind of branched out into a side project about freshwater fossils and one of her key ones was the New Zealand crayfish which is an extremely primitive form of crayfish it has very very derived and specific parasites that can only affect it and crayfish are not the sort of thing that even if you submerged an island D submerged it and gave it a land bridge these things are not going to be spreading quickly and the other one she was looking at was a form of mussel and as we know the only reason mussels are become invasive species today if people are transporting them around they're not the kind of thing that can just uproot themselves and wander five lakes down the down the road however she has one problem and that's the pollen ology so when people take a look at the fossil record of plants in New Zealand things get really really messy so for a long time the southern beech tree here was seen as a Guan Guanyin relic and exclusive to New Zealand however when they did a study a comparative study of pollen ology yes the pollen from these guys were showing up in New Zealand they were also showing up in Australia and the kicker is they were showing up in Australia the species they were looking at were showing up anywhere between five to two million years before they were in New Zealand and what they were finding is it would evolve in Australia and slowly but steadily make its way over to New Zealand become established in New Zealand go extinct but in the meantime a new species had evolved in Australia and then it would spread over to New Zealand as that first species was going to extinct in New Zealand there was a pattern of basically evolution here in Australia it would wane in Australia but it would pick up in Austin in New Zealand and so we were having this extinction evolution chain going and immediately you're going well how could seeds do that well one of those things that happen with that Southern Ocean opening up is a giant wind system that constantly goes around Antarctica brewed up it's known as the Roaring Forties because it lines up with the 46 parallel southern parallel on the earth and what we're finding is there's evidence that plants are just scattering themselves along the southern hemisphere along this wind boundary so the plants of New Zealand most species that they've taken a look at actually have an origin somewhere else there's a few species interesting though that evolved in New Zealand and then they get blown to places like South America and Indonesia well one of the plants that's immediately pointed to our plant families that's pointing to as Guanyin is the fern family there's a couple indigenous species of course in New Zealand one of the famous ones it's a silver fern here and of course it looks very prehistoric it looks like it could be from the Mesozoic of course that could totally be a gwaan wanyan ancestor but what we're finding is when we actually do genetic tests on these modern fern plants is we're finding that there's actually gene flow there across like what do they they don't germinate but they're they're spreading genetic material spores they're actually popping every single spot I've marked on the map of course this dawn Australia's supposed to mark all of Australia and similarly southern Africa and southern South America etc they're actually sharing genetic materials through this as current list this wind that constantly blows this way and it's constantly spreading so the plant life in New Zealand and the southern hemisphere in general is really mucking with people's idea of isolation on an island it appears plants at least in the south are able to overcome this they aren't endemic they dispersed and that's all they do so moas arc as far as plants is concerned looks like for the most part it's sunk these plants are dispersing as opposed to becoming endemic however we can kind of salvage some things so one of the big things I mentioned is that the genetic studies on these ferns are tying into what's called the molecular clock so for people who aren't aware of that what people are doing is they're taking similar animals and similar families so for example I'm going to talk about penguins here so what they would be doing is they take the genetic material of a penguin such as this yellow eyed penguin one of New Zealand's indigenous penguins and they would test it to other penguins and even other birds to see where the genetic variance comes in and they've been able to through both estimates on how gene flow works and also fossils they've been able to come up with what is known as a molecular clock we can kind of predict where these animals diverged and you know evolved away from each other on well penguins are cool because originally they were thought to have evolved about 15 million years ago so well after the extinction of the dinosaurs but this penguin right here I showed him a little bit earlier actually comes from 60 million years ago which is oh sorry should be just a little bit higher up on the thing oops but what we think this is showing in conjunction so right away we have a penguin pop up way before he should have about ten million years before it should have but the molecular clocks the genetic studies on modern penguins are telling us that penguins theoretically evolved into true penguins as of 68 there sorry um 70 million years ago so we actually started this is this is the fossil here and the molecular clock is telling us we may very well have Mesozoic penguins in New Zealand or the southern hemisphere in general there's a lot of bird remains that have been referred to as possible' hesperornis from South America and Antarctica that probably I'm guessing once they're properly analyzed they're gonna turn out to be penguins which is kind of neat we have other evidence for a Mozart can the line of animals so things like the tuatara if New Zealand completely submerged there is nowhere else that we have any evidence or any clue of something like a tuatara living and then getting back to New Zealand so if you completely drown New Zealand there's no tuataras to replace we can't replace or the point we can't introduce to Attar's or somewhere else they don't live anywhere else their strong evidence that part of New Zealand survived additionally we have birds like the MOA moas have a very long standing history in New Zealand they go back to about 40 million years ago we also have New Zealand reptiles such as the skanks and geckos molecular testing and a little bit of fossil evidence but specifically the molecular evidence tells us these guys are probably a direct gondwanian descendant another neat one are the parrots that a lot of people know about but New Zealand parrots appear to have introduced themselves about ten million years after the KT and they have evolved into very unique forms there the New Zealand is the home of the only flightless parrot in the world sadly very endangered but that's due to human influence not anything else however the Kiwi bird which is often cited as one of these unique evolutionary offshoots a very unusual flightless bird he's very closely related to a MOA but with the molecular testing that they're doing with these molecular clocks he's only evolved in the last 20 million years meaning it's not a direct one wanyan descendant it may very well tie into that submergence thing a mean New Zealand was underwater it's it's one of these questions that probably didn't completely submerge but it definitely mocks up the idea of a perfect moas arc and last of all back to that fossil site from the lake complex that I was talking about from 16 million years ago this is a rogue fossil that was found that completely blows the narrative of New Zealand out of the water does anybody know what this is it's a mammal what is going on now New Zealand I'll just quickly note is home of bats they're the only native terrestrial mammals today of course marine reptile marine mammals such as whales and seals and all those sorts of things but there are no ground dwelling mammals today and the narrative has always been mammals were not really there they went extinct at the KT so birds were free to do their own thing but yet we have a mammal pop up 16 million years ago what's going on a very interesting question what were the evolutionary and biological circumstances that allowed birds to evolve into those megafauna ecosystem slots that mammals did everywhere else on the world it's a marsupial mammal the question is whether it's directly tied to gwon wanna or did it evolve our story was introduced after that's emergence but yet never took off we don't know so the overall story we have here is unfortunately New Zealand's fossil records not enough to answer some of the questions that hopefully I raised in your minds here today but there is hope yet there's tons and tons of fossil potential deposits all throughout the country there's just not enough people looking for them so anybody who's looking for a fun exotic place to go hunt for fossils I suggest contacting dr. Fordyce or any of the other paleontologists in New Zealand and try to work out something with them but that brings to a conclusion the remnants of a lost continent New Zealand I'd like to give a special thanks to you and Fordyce for letting me tag along with him on so many expeditions and the prep lab and more Lapointe point up with all my questions my fiance Ron win' for tolerating me doing all of these things because I'd often leave her all alone for a weekend and finally to Peter bond for Lamy throw the test version of this talk to beyond that I am finished thank you very much - Francois the Royal Tyrrell Museum and the cooperating Society and of course to all of you for braving the weather to come see me talk that is the end [Applause]

Channel: Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology

Views: 85,462

Rating: 4.717135 out of 5

Keywords: Speaker Series, Royal Tyrrell, Palaeontology, Paleontology, New Zealand

Id: M8FDAwePbTM

Length: 71min 18sec (4278 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2018