THE FIRST MOA BONES.

Marlborough Express, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 277, 18 November 1905, Page 4

THE FIRST MOA BONES.

(By "Okarima,")

In 1830 a sailor called at the museum of the Royal College of Sirgeons, London, and offered lor .sale to the curator, Professor Owen, part of a broken bone, 6 inches long and 5J inches in circumference in the thinr.tst place, saying that it was the. bone of a very large eagle, and that he had obtained it in New Zealand from a native. In confirmation of his story he showed one of the greenstone implements then very common am on*; the Maoris. After looking at the bone the great osteologist replied. " The bones of birds are hollow and filled with air; this is a marrow bone, like those served up at table wrapped in napkins/ Desiring, as was his wont, to probe the matter to the bottom, ho offered to examine the bone more carefully and to determine the kind of animal to which it belonged if left witli him until the following day, when he would be more at leisure. How the examination was conducted is besttold in Professor Owen's own words: "As soon as i was at leisure 1 took the bone to the skeleton of the ox, expecting to verify my first surmise ; but with some resemblance to the shaft ot the thigh bone, there were precluding differences; from the ox's bumerus, which also affords the tavern delicacy, the discrepancy of shape was still more marked. Led by the thickness of the wall of the narrow cavity, I proceeded to compare the bone with similar sized portions of the skeletons of the various quadrupeds which might have been introduced and have left their remains in New Zealand. But it was clearly unconformable with any such portions. In the course of the comparisons I noted certain obscure superficial markings on the bones, which recalled to mind similar ones which I had observed on the surface of the long bones in some large birds. Thereupon 1 proceeded with it to the skeleton of the ostrich. The bone tallied in point of size with the shaft of the thigh-bone, but was markedly different in shape. "There were, however, the same superficial reticulate impressions on th.3 ostrich's femur which had caught my attention in the exhaustive comparison previously made with thy mammalian bones.

"In short, .stimulated to a more minute and extended examination, 1 arrived at the conviction that the specimen had come from a bird; that it was the shaft of a thigh bone; and that it must have formed part of the skeleton of a bird as large as, if not larger than, the full-sized male ostrich —with this more striking difference, that whereas the femur of the ostrich, like that of the cassowary, emu, rheu, and eagle, is ' pneumatic,'' or contains air, the present huge bird's bone had been filled with marrow, like that of a beast."

When the sailor called next day at the museum he had the pleasure of hearing that his piece of marrow bone was a really important discovery. At that time Professor Owen was not in a position to give the £10 guineas asked by its owner for the bone, but he kindly undertook to find a purchaser, and soon succeeded, Benjamin Bright, then M.P. for Bristol, giving the required amount. The trustees of the Hunterian and British Museums, though solicited, declined to spend their funds on such an unpromisinglooking relic. On the 12th November of the same year (1839) Professor Owen submitted to the Zoological Society a paper on the fragment of bone, in which he gave his reasons for concluding that a large ostrich-like bird had existed, or still existed in the New Zealand archipelago. His account of how the paper was received is worth quoting, as it shows how very little was then known of this country or its productions: " I was not surprised," he says, " that there was some hesitation in the Publication Committee as to the admission of the paper with the plate into the ' Transactions.'

"The bone was not fossilised; it might have come from a kind still existing. But a bird larger than' an ostrich, belonging to a ' heavier and more sluggish species,' could hardly have escaped observation in a tract of dry land such as New Zealand. Moreoxer, after arriving at the conviction that the ' bone ' was part of a huge terrestrial bird, I still felt some uncertainty as to the alleged habitat. At that date the largest known land bird of the islands of New Zealand was the apteryx (kiwi), and even its existence had begun to be doubted. Accordingly the Earl of Derby, then President of the Zoological Society, who possessed the unique skin which had been brought by Captain Barclay from New Zealand in 1812, and had been figured by Dr. Shaw in his ' Naturalist's Miscellany,' transmitted the specimen to the Society, and confided it in 1833 for re-examination and description to William Jarrell.

" Now this bird was barely the size of a pheasant, and the ' bone ' indicated a bird as big as an ostrich. "But the ostrich lias the continent of Africa for its home, the rhea roams over South America, the emu over Australia; the cassowary has not only New Guinea, but North Australia, and some neighbouring islands, as its habitat

" The misgivings of Vigors and some other of my zoological contemporaries were as to the possibility of a terrestiial bird, of the size I supposed, having been able at any time" to find subsistence in so small a tract as New Zealand."

Had the fragment of bone fallen into other hands than Professor Chven's it would probably have been put aside unnoticed. Considering the way in which it was regarded by scientists generally, the question forces itself on us: Who was the sailor, or what manner of man was he, that saw in this unpromising-looking relic a something worth carrying all the way to London? And, again, why did he say it belonged to an eagle? I have before me as I write the thigh-bone of a moa, and assuredly, if I had never heard or read about- the extinct dinornis, a bird of any kind is the last animal in the world I would' have referred it to. _ Possibly the natives from whom the sailor obtained the specimen may have said it was a bird's bone, butthen, why did not the missionaries, who had been amongst the Maoris a quarter of a century, hear something about the great bird, or pick up some ot its remains? In 1883-4 Dr Buckland, the eminent geologist, and subsequently Dean of Westminster, received from New Zealand two large boxes of moa bones. From these, Professor Owen reconstructed several skeletons, proving beyond question that the country had formerly been tenanted by a race of wingless birds, including species about the size of a bustard, and others exceeding in height the ostrich, then considered the largest of all birds. This consignment of bones was forwarded by the Rev. William Williams, one of the earliest New Zealand missionaries; and had been collected for him by the Maoris, who informed him they were the bones of birds. As Mr Williams had not heard of the bone brought to London by the sailor, his was an independent discovery. Here 1 may mention that a friend, whose recollections of the colony date back to the forties, informed me that in those early days there were heaps of moa bones in many of tho Hawke's Bay pahs, but I have not had an oppoitunity of following up this information. The first moa bone, together with complete skeletons of the'strango extinct bird, are now in the South' Kensington Museum, London, testifying to the ability of the man who from the oia conjured up the other.