MUSEUM OF NATURE

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32524, 6 February 1971, Page 11

MUSEUM OF NATURE

Henry O. Forbes, great osteologist

(Contributed by the Canterbury Museum)

Henry Ogg Forbes came to Canterbury in 1888 from Scotland, to succeed Julius von Haast as curator of the Canterbury Museum, and resigned in 1892. He was bom on January 30, 1851, at Drumblade,

Aberdeenshire. He attended the Grammar School at Aberdeen, and continued his studies at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Shortly before he was to qualify for a medical career, be lost an eye in an accident and abandoned medicine. He was.a fellow of the Zoological Society of London, and belonged to the Scottish Geographical Society, The British Ornithologists’ Union and of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. The results of early journeyings were published in London in 1885, as “A Naturalist’s Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago” and demand was such that a second edition was published the same year. He was an able artist, and the book is illustrated by his drawings and sketches. In New Zealand he left his mark mainly as an Osteologist It was the collection assembled by Forbes which really laid the foundation of the Canterbury Museum’s collection of comparative bird skeletons. Others, and particularly the writer, have added to it over the years, until today it is unrivalled in any New Zealand Museum.

Like Haast Forbes also had a moa swamp to excavate. In 1891 Mr Flett a ploughman on the farm of Mr W. Meek at Enfield near Oamaru, turned up some bones; and Mr Meek invited Forbes to investigate the find. Eight species of Moa were represented, and Forbes considered over 800 individuals had died there. On the Chatham Island Forbes found, and named an extinct large Crow, Palaeocorax mariorum. Bones of this bird have also been found in New Zealand. Recently Mr J. GrantMackie and the writer discovered that it dates dack at least until the late Pleistocene, about 20,000 years ago. On the Chathams he also found an extinct flightless, or nearly flightless coot, now known as Nesophalaris chatamensis (Forbes). Probably of greatest interest to the general reader, was the discovery by Forbes that Njw Zealand and the Chatham Islands were once inhabited by a large swan, C h e n o p i s sumnerensis. Forbes named it from bones found in Monck’s Cave, Sumner. It was larger than, but closely related to, the Australian black swan, Chenopis atrata, which has now filled the “ecological niche” left vacant by its extinct relative. His departure for England was a blow to New Zealand osteology, because, apart from the great Richard Owen, be added more to the know-

ledge of our extinct birds than any other man in the 19th century. After returning to Great Britain, he became Director

of the Liverpool Museums, and Reader in Ethnology at the University of Liverpool. He died in 1932, aged 81.— R.J.S.