ZOO'S RIP VAN WINKLE

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3718, 9 November 1926, Page 2

ZOO'S RIP VAN WINKLE

THE WONDERFUL TUATARA A TALE OF EARLY TIMES Our natural historian (says I My Magazine ’) has been to see the living fossil of New Zealand at the London Zoo, and gives ns this little talk about him :■»- Wo call him a. Rip Van Winkle, because it seems as ii lile, while carrying all other animal for ins swiftly on in the current of development, has passed him by, left him unchanged for millions of years, a creature to-day preserving the' form and habits of its kind of ages and ages long gone. The sphenodon s is a distinct family to itself, for whose nearest kindred wo have to blast the rocks to find fossils "'lnch passed out of creation so long age- diat they themselves are now part of the rock itself. Perhaps the sphenodon., or the tnatara, as they call this most ancient of all reptiles, is the solo surviving link with the giant dinosaurs, those terrible monsters which on ice possessed and ruled the earth. They slowly faded out of life, the terrible lizards, the giants of the waters, the ichthyosauruses, and others; and crocodiles and alligators have arisen in their place, with enormous tribes of snakes, lizards, tortoises, and turtles, very old now, but mushrooms, upstarts, compared with the sphenodon. Everything changes, everything passes, says the French proverb", but the sphenodon goes on, as if for ever, mnaltered, unimproved, the changeless product of a backwater of life. The actual Rin Van Winkle was, of course, a man, the hero of possibly the most famous short story in the world. H t > fell asleep in the CatskilQ Mountains a North American subject of George the Third, and awoke twenty years later to find himself a citizen hr the United States, with George Washington for his President. Now, the old legend on which that story is based rests on the Dutch legend that onr great voyager, the heroic. Henry Hudson, who discovered and gave his name to the famous Hudson Bay, did not perish of cold and starvation when he and his little sou were turned adrift in the boat by the brutal mutineers of his crew; they escaped into the Catskill Mountains and live there still, and the low thunder which is from time t§ time heard in the hills is actually only the sound of the Hudsons at their game of ninepins. So a sea and land legend gives us a world-known name to characterise the drowsy sphenodon, which has outlived all its kind and seen new orders of life arise without being affected by them. But there comes into the story a second immortal sailor, and he has had a much greater influence on sphenodon life; so great, indeed, as almost to effect that which Time itself lias been unable to bring about. Our famous Captain Cook, though he little knew it, let loose forces which brought the age-old sphenodoiu to the brink of extinction. It is one of the strangest stories in the history of colonisation. When Cook was about to depart from the newly-explored New Zealand in 1773 he called to him the Maori chief of Queen Charlotte Sound, gave him three pigs, and made him promise to let them run free and not kill them. “ Give them their liberty for a time and they will stock the islamd,” said the great explorer. The chieftain kept his promise and the dream of Cook came true. Those three pigs grew into an incredible multitude. They overran tbo island. The Maoris called them, after their giver, Captain Cooks. Captain Cooks so abounded in time that they became a positive plague. Never within equal space were there such enormous herds of swine. They came to form the staple diet of the Maoris and of the early white settlers; but, heavy as grew this toll upon their numbers, they increased out of all control. They had to bo hunted down, like the rabbit and Australia’s dingo. They were entirely wild, and made their homes far from the centres of population, yet near enough to the small villages to enable them to ravage crops, A Government inspector in Nelson Province found the ground ploughed up by them for miles.

Pig-hunting was let on contract by the Government, and one party of three men alone, in the course of a. year, slew 25,UUU pigs, and pledged themselves to dispose of .15,000 more.

But what has this to do with the sphenodonP Everything. Until the coming of the pigs .sphenodons swarmed in New Zealand. The pigs ate them by thousands; they practically ate them off the mainland, so that their ultimate sanctuary became a few tiny islands near the coast. Thus one mariner’s name recalls their habits of restful placidity through a million years and more; another equally famous son of the sea enters their lives almost to exterminate them. The remnants of the ancient family are few and precious to-day, and still preserve features of ancient life at which all naturalists marvel. New Zealand has its winter, and winter comes in New Zealand when the sphenodon’s eggs are but half-way to maturity. That is to say, the baby sphenodon is alive in the egg yet not sufficiently developed to ho hatched. So when winter arrives tho unborn embryo, instead of dying like a neglected chicken, falls asleep in its shell, and does not break out of the shell until the following spring. Thus it takes thirteen months to hatch a sphenodon egg, whereas some of our birds are hatched in fourteen days. Another remarkable feature of this reptile is that it possesses on the crown of its head the remains of a third eye. True, this is sightless, and is now covered by a scale, hut there is the evidence of its former use; the fnnctionless organ is still mounted on a stalk which pierces the bone of the skull and remains to tell ns of far-off days when these reptiles were threeeyed . When that discovery was made known it set scientific circles on fire, as it were, and a world-wide search was made by naturalists for similar cases, with the residt that remnants of ;i similar eye in many other orders were found in various lands, and a new chapter of the past history of oldtime creation was opened.

The zoo sphenodon sleeps through our winter, like our native lizards. Irogs. toads, and hedgehogs. Fears were entertained that it was dead: so it was unearthed from it-, burrow of soil and leaves. The sphenodon responded by sleepily stirring, splitting <-iT its old skin, and taking a warm mini and a meal of earth worms; and all went merrily as a marriage bell.

I\ow, there is a curiosity about that winter sleep, lor the English winter occurs when summer is with New Zeai laud. How, then, lias tliis reptile, I which arrived here only last year, so I magically changed its habit and taken | its winter sleep when it should have I been frisking in the sunshine ot a New Zealand summer? The theory is that it was the absence of light which sent our visitor to sleep, the darkness of the winter days—not the cold, for its house is warmed, it brought with it across the world the impulse to hibernate in winter; darkness called the instinct into operation. To realise how very strange that is take an opposite case. Certain lovebirds, the pretty little Australian budgerigars, crossed the seas and came to an outdoor aviary in Kent. There, to everybody’s amazement, they easily squeezed themselves in I and out of a tiny nest put up lor ) birds of the size of tomtits, and laid I eggs. And 10, on the bitterest day oTa very cold January, with Ain < snow on the ground, out from the eggs 1 came live line baby budgerigars. 1 Our January is the Australian high summer, .and tor all our snowy winter summer was in the blood ot these Australian birds. The young ones throve magnificently in spite or the snow and frost, and their descendants errew to scores before the aviary aas | dismantled. But the spbenodon 1 though it can change its habit with i the absence of light, unlike the loye--1 birds cannot lay its eggs in our wm- ; ter, it seems, no matter what may ’ be the temperature of New Zealand at the time. And so farewell to Cook | and Hudson, and many happy returns to our reptile I?ip Van Winkle.