Quick Dips

Home-Grown Dinosaurs

Victoria University has attracted attention with its display of New Zealand dinosaurs. The show includes the remains of theropods -- flesh-eating dinosaurs which had large heads, strong teeth and powerful hind legs. It has only been comparatively recently that dinosaur evidence in New Zealand has come to light.

Many of the bones on display were found by self-taught paleontologist Joan Wiffen in Hawke's Bay. She and an enthusiastic band of amateur fossil hunters have located bones from a variety of dinosaurs which inhabited New Zealand until 65 million years ago.

"The dinosaur fossils have been found in a stream in the Te Hoe Valley in north-west Hawke's Bay," says Wiffen. "The fossils are embedded in hard sandstone rock and it's a very time-consuming process extracting them before you can try to identify them -- you don't know what you've got when you first find a fossil in a rock."

The display is now a permanent part of the university's Alexander McKay Geological Museum.