Quick Dips

Swampy Skeletons

Dr Ian Stringer and Liz Grant from Massey University's Ecology Department have been called out several times to look at old bones dug up on farm land.

Usually the bones turn out to be from cows or horses, but the latest call sounded more promising. For one thing, the bones had been dug up from a swamp, and for another, one of the bones was 85cms long.

Yes -- this time they really were moa bones. An exciting find for the farmer in the southern Manawatu who had been digging out a spring, and a very exciting find for the Department of Ecology.

Stringer and Grant found 25 bones in all. One leg bone, the tibiotarsus, is 85.2cm long and identifies it as being a particularly large specimen, the Dinornis giganteus.

The leg bones are all very large and point to the bird having weighed about 250kg, with the top of the pelvis being about two metres above ground.

Stringer says this particular species was not common in the North Island, and the bones could be up to 10,000 years old. He says they have been very well preserved because they have been in a peat bog and closed off from the air. They will need to dry out very slowly.

There were also bones from at least two other smaller moa, and although they are different specimens, they could well be of the same species.

While cleaning the bones, Grant found two oesophageal rings which are quite delicate and only about the size of an average wedding ring. There was also part of the cranium, about the size of the palm of Grant's hand, remarkably small considering the size of the body.

She says a couple of interesting things about moa are that they had no wings, not even remnant wings like kiwis have, nor did they have tail feathers.

Unlike emus, moa did not hold their heads up high but stretched their necks and heads out in an almost horizontal position. The 14 species of moa browsed on shrubs and bushes.

Stringer says moa bones used to be quite common in the lower Manawatu, but there have not been many discovered in recent years. The researchers are particularly pleased that these bones have been donated by the farmer to the Ecology Department.