IN TOUCH WITH NATURE

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16726, 5 December 1914, Page 4

IN TOUCH WITH NATURE

NOTES ON NATURAL HISTORY IN

NEW ZEALAND

(By J. DRUMMOND, F.L.S., F.Z.S.)

Tho golden ago of reptiles in New Zealand was in the Cretaceous Period, several millions of- years ago, after mammals had come into the scheme of creation, but while they were small, insignificant and timid. Although New Zealand's present reptilian life is confined to the tuatara and ,a few species of lizards, there was a time When reptiles abounded here, on the land and in the sea. Perhaps the greatest of these was Plcsiosaurus, whoso remains have been found fairly frequently junidst the ruins of that old New Zealand of whose history pakeontology supplies such tantalising fragments. Plesiosaurus was an aquatic reptile with a long neck, a. small lizard-like head, a barrel-shaped body, and a large eye. It lived mostly in the estuaries of rivers and in shallow water near the coast, concealing itself in vegetation, but occasionally it swam out into the open sea. It progressed by means of a long tail with a broad fin at the end, and it balanced itself by two sets of paddles like tlie paddles of a whale. It was' about twenty feet long and carnivorous by nature, and probably it caught and devoured large quantities of the strange forms of mail-clad fishes New Zealand possessed in those Cretaceous days.

Plesfosaurus, who was cosmopolitan in habits, roamed the seas of almost every country, but Cimoliosaurus, who was a wee bit connection of his, and a contemporary, seems to have been a stay-at-homs New Zealander. There is a good specimen of Cimoliosaurus's remains in Canterbury Museum, taken from the Waipara district. It lies on its back, with the massive backbone and several ribs and the lower bones of the shoulder-girdle showing distinctly. Part of the tail has been preserved but the end ia absent, as well as the head and neck and all the limbs. The length of the specimen is about six feet, but the reptile, in life, probably was between twelve and fifteen feet! Quartz pebbles lying in the region of the stomach may have been ':wnllowed by the reptile. In the same district there were found part of a jaw and of a skull. From these it in thought that the skull was between three feet and three feet six inches long. A collection of this reptile's bones is in the British Museum, side by side with the bones of species of Plesiosaurus from many parts of the world. In the Dominion Museum in Wellington there are the vertebra, skull and pad-dlo-bones of a marine reptile called Taniwhasaurus —a mixture of Maori and Greek—found at the Amuri Bluff. Leiodon was another marine lizard of theso parts.' It was abundant also in American waters, where it sometimes attained a length of one hundred feet. It had a large head; its eyes were partly directed upwards; and it wna equipped with very formidable teeth, fixed on to the jaw instead of being placed in sockets, like the teeth of Cimoliosaurus.

The Ichthyosaurus—the fish-lizard—-another widely-distributed creature, had a head liko a lizard, a. beak like a porpoise, jaws and teeth like a crocodile,'paddles like a whale.vertebi'ffl liko a fish, and eyes of such magnitude that they excelled in size the eyes of any other known animal,- past or present. In appearance and habits, this fishlizard resembled the whales and porpoises of these times, but its crocodilian characters and the fossil remains of its food show that it was predacious nnd voracious. Somo of the species grow to ft great length. A fossil specimen in the British Museum represents an animal twenty-four feet long. In most cases the cavity of the eye is about four inches in diameter, but in the Geological Society's collection of remains in London there is a skull in which the cavity is much larger. Most of the marine reptiles of those days, probably, went ashore to lay their eggs, but Ichthyosaurus could not do that, and it was viviparous. Skeletons have been found in other countries with remains of tho young in the places whore the bodies of tho females rested before death. The remains of the fishreptilo are found only in marine dopositSj showing that it lived exclusively in the sea It was contemporaneous with Plesiosaurus and Cimoliosaurus, and probably individuals of these three groups of dragons met and fought in many tumultuous battles.

More than thirty species of Ichthyosaurus have been recognised, some small, some large, but all bearing the predominant characters of the germs. The species show different stages of development, and generally it seems clear that the group descended originally from land reptiles, not from fishes. Their ancestors abandoned' the land in order to live in the water. The relationship of Ichthyosaurus to other known reptiles has not been definitely worked out, but apparently its nearest connections were the Rhynchoeephalians, tho beak-headed people. They are one of the oldest reptilian types known at present, and they are represented in the world to-day by our tuatara, whose ancestry can be traced back for millions of years, and who, if ancient lineage marks tho aristocrat, is the bluest-blooded animal now living.

The Rhynchocephalians > were the lowest form of reptilian life. They olosely approached the next class in the social scale of _ the animal' kingdom, the . amphibians; and in New Zealand, probably, in the Carboniferous, Permian and Triassic Periods there lived the most famous of all amphibians, Labyrinthodon. Its name means the creature with teeth bearing a pattern like a labyrinth. The perfection of structure of. its teeth is not reached by the teeth of any living amphibian. Some Labyrinthodons were of gigantic size. The head of one species was three feet long and two feet broad. The head and upper parts of the body were protected by bony plates, which supplied a kind of armour. Many years before the fossilised remains of Labyrinthodons were brought to light, strange footprints, greatly like the mark of a huge human nand, were found in rocks in different parts of the world. These were believed to belong to a mysterious and extinct animal. The footprints supplied a clue to the structure and appearance of the animal that had made them, and a hypothetical creature was constructed and was named ".hand-beast." When the remains were available, it was found that the crdature corresponded closely with tho actual Labyrinthodon. The incident demonstrates the soundness of palaxmtological and anatomical reasoning. Another incident of the same kind was Sir Richard Owen's remarkably accurate reconstruction of the moa from the fragment of a thigh-hone.