MIRAMAR RELICS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVI, Issue 108, 3 November 1908, Page 4

MIRAMAR RELICS.

Relic-hungers /have been busy on the Miramar Penin/ula of late, and there has been quite a large harvest of pieces of moa egg shell gathered in. Mr. Hector M'Leod on Saturday collected some egg shell pieces from a Maori umu, or oven, a few feet above nigh water-mark; also a bane which is believed to be that of one of the toes of a moa. It is about 1^ inches wide at tlie base, and tapers away to a point as if it had been, covered at one time by a thick horny claw. Mr. M'iLeod also found some jaw bones of tuatara lizards, and the remains of a big whale. The latter were well inland, about half a mile from Lyell Bay, towards 'Seatoun. This is the second batch of cetacean remains found in the locality. How they got there it is very hard to say, as it is extremely unlikely that whalers would have carried the remains so far inland. If the whales were washed there then one of two hypotheses may ba accepted : that a tidal wave carried the carcases far inshore, or that the land has been raised with the embedded carcases in it. If this was the case, then Evans Bay wa6 a strait and Miramar an island at some remote time. The whale bones, are, however, exceedingly friable where they have come into contact wiWi the air by the blowing away of the sand in which they were buried.