Trevor Worthy of University of New South Wales (and previously of Adelaide and who worked for Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, born in Masterton), and others, have confirmed the existence of an NZ crocodile and other species lost in the ages, that once roamed Otago plains before the Southern Alps were born. The birds and ducks and fish were in a huge lake 9 times the size of Lake Taupo. Lake Manuherikia was 5600sq kilometres in area and many bones have been opened at St Bathans in sandstone rock at the edge of a current riverbed.
There was a sense of expectation as we drove down the broom-lined track towards the Manuherikia River. It was December 2001, and we hoped that exposed layers of sediment in the Bannockburn Formation would reveal a bone or two, bones that would help us understand what New Zealand may have been like 16 million years ago. We could not have known what a treasure trove lay in wait. (contined below)…
More here…
http://www.nzgeographic.co.nz/issue-107/st-bathansAn interview on Radio NZ with Kathryn Ryan just recently : Audio from Thursday 24 November 2011
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/20111124http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2503330/feature-guest-trevor-worthy.asx for the interview file – 37mins long.
On their website they share some images of artist Thomas Simpson in the NZ Geographic magazine -
IMAGES TO VIEW:
http://www.nzgeographic.co.nz/issue-107/st-bathans in Issue 107 Jan - Feb 2011
Some of these images are shown on the Radio NZ website :
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/galleries/stbathans Rest of Document from NZGeographic synopsis:
The Manuherikia River flows down a valley of the same name in Central Otago, bubbling through riffles and pools and over millions of years of history. This was once an enormous lake stretching from Naseby to Bannockburn and Ranfurly to the Waitaki Valley—an area 10 times that of Lake Taupo.
It swarmed with life, which thrived then perished in the silty lakebed and remains there to this day, a quiet record of creatures unique to New Zealand from a time well before humans. Alan Tennyson of Te Papa museum, Craig Jones of GNS Science and Trevor Worthy of the University of New South Wales began surveying exposed sections of gravel, mudstone and shale along the riverbank.
Within minutes, someone had discovered a bone protruding from a bed of the Miocene sandstone, and in the next hour or two the 100-metre exposure revealed several more. They were small, brittle and bleached where they protruded from the sediment. Some were broken by the turbulent course of the past 16 million years, others were perfectly preserved, the finest details cushioned by the mud as if they were wrapped in tissue paper. These were discoveries beyond a palaeozoologist’s wildest expectations—the bones of creatures long extinct and unknown to science, simply waiting to be dug out.
The next day, we headed to another site, affectionately known by palaeontologists as Croc Site, because it was from here that a crocodilian bone had been described in 1997—the first, and until then the only, example found in New Zealand. We quarried lumps of the sandstone and put them in our sieves to break down in the flow of the river. Over the course of an hour, the silt was washed away, leaving pebbles and a macabre assortment of bone fragments. First bird bones, and then a great flurry of excitement—a tooth, unmistakably crocodilian.
That New Zealand had once hosted a crocodile of sorts was interesting enough, but here we were all gathered around the sieve staring at a 16 to 19 million-year-old fragment of history, complete with root and crown, as though it had fallen from our own mouths.
Little did we know then that this find would set us on a journey of discovery that would continue for almost a decade, with expeditions every year. Through the heat of droughts and the icy cold of sleet and snow, the Otago hills offered up a hugely significant trove of fossils, revealing with each dig another small piece of New Zealand’s prehistoric past.
Paul Scofield of Canterbury Museum and colleagues Suzanne Hand and Mike Archer from the University of New South Wales have joined the search in recent years, excavating several sites around the St Bathans township. Initially the work was funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, but, in recognition of the international significance of the find, grants for the past three years have come from the Australian Research Council.
The discovery is unique in part because of its age. Most of the bones are thought to be between 16 and 19 million years old, in the Miocene period, long after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Another document about the same subject is found here:
Otago's lost lake of wonders
WORLD OF SCIENCE - BOB BROCKIE
http://www.stuff.co.nz/blogs/opinion/columnists/1754549/Otagos-lost-lake-of-wondersLast updated 07:57 23/02/2009
….
Several paleontologists, including Trevor Worthy, Paul Scofield and Te Papa's Alan Tennyson, broke up the Manuherikia sandstone, sifted it under running water and sorted out heaps of bones and eggsheck fragments.
They found the fossil bones of more than 20 unknown bird species - six kinds of duck, an eagle, an adzebill, two birds like small wekas, a big gull, two wading birds, a pigeon, three kinds of parrot, an owlet-nightjar, a swift, a diving petrel, a goose, and three other unknown species, one like a crow - all extinct. They also found plenty of broken duck eggshecks and eggsheck from a small moa.
Apart from fossil bones of skinks, geckos and bats, they discovered a primitive mammal, and have just announced the discovery of tuatara jaws and teeth. At one stage the scientists thought they had found teeth of a fossil snake but closer examination proved the teeth were those of a fish. Because all these fossil animals were found near the township of St Bathans, they have been named the "St Bathans Fauna".
These discoveries are of great biological interest because they push the fossil history of moas back 14 million years and reveal that a primitive mouse-sized mammal wiped out by the dinosaur-killing meteor all round the world, survived ghost-like or as a living fossil and alone in New Zealand for more than 40 million years.
The fossils also fill a 70-million- year gap in the fossil history of tuatara and prove that New Zealand could not have sunk completely beneath the waves 25 million years ago as some geologists claim. Southern rocks have also turned up fossil karaka fruit, showing that these trees were here 16 million years before some Maori claim to have brought them from Hawaiki. New Zealand rocks continue to throw up unexpected fossils. Dinosaur fossils, for example, have recently been unearthed on the Chatham Islands.
So far, the Central Otago fossil hunters have examined only tiny corners of the vast ancient Manuherikia lakebed. Thousands of square kilometres remain to be investigated. There's no telling what these and other rocks will yield.
Image below c/- Thomas Simpson in the NZ Geographic magazine on RadioNZ website with others linked above.
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March 24, 2013, 01:53:29 PM