THE MOA.

Timaru Herald, Volume XCVIII, Issue 18084, 30 May 1923, Page 8

THE MOA.

A MORTUARY RELIC. j ADDED TO THE MUSEUM. ' There lias just been presented to the Municipal Museum, by Mr W. Smith, manager of the South Canterbury Brickworks, and placed in the appropriate case, an addition to tho relics of the moa. New Zealand’s huge extinct bird. This relic is a fragment of a leg bone of a good-sized moa, partly embedded in clay, as it was found in the course of quarrying for the works. The “face” at which quarrying is carried on is 35 to 40 feet high, and the bit of bone was unearthed, near the bottom of the face. It is decayed to softness, as are all the moa bones met with deep in the clay ; and leg bones only have been found, smaller ones having decayed and disappeared either before or after burial. It is necessarily a relic of a moa, as no other land animals having such large bones lived in New Zealand at the time the bed of clay was being formed. The lump of clay in which the bit of bone is embedded, contains also relics of a lowlier kind of animal, in unfilled borings of earthworms. These worm borings are better seen in the face of the clay, as short, brown vertical markings. They occur in numbers in certain bands in the,clay, these being separated from each other by bands containing very few or no borings. There are bands of worm borings in the working face at the brickyard. Beside the specimen above described is a smaller one showing, embedded in its surface, a smooth quartz pebble. This was once a gizzard pebble of a moa; the huge birds required bigger “grit” than do our comparatively tiny domestic fowls. “Moa stones” are found at various depths in the clay, and more plentifully on or in the surface soil nearly all over New Zealand. There is, in the same case in the museum, a collection of gizzard stones * from the Timaru clay, some of. them so small that they must have been used, by small birds of other kinds. Of the larger “moa stones,” one is marked “7 ounces.” . . A third piece of clay, from tho brick works face lias been in the museum for some time. This piece contains a cavitv within which, was found an oval object, which is said to have been a calculus or gall stone... that was an internal inconvenience it not also a cause of death, to the moa which grew it This curious relic has been veil preserved, though, chemically altered hv replacement of some other substance bv oxide of iron.. \ll three specimens in clay were presented by Mr W. Smith.