Inspired by Jurassic World, Amber Allott has gone a little dinosaur crazy. Here she gives you a run-down of New Zealand’s greatest reptilian beasts and the history behind them.
People have always been captivated by the majestic reptiles that once roamed our lands, seas and skies. From the scientists who scour the earth for their fossilised remains, to the children who gaze in awe, open-mouthed, at the carefully arranged exhibits in museums, to everybody who queues up to see the latest film in the iconic Jurassic Park series, humanity’s desire to see and learn more about these prehistoric titans seems endless.
In their time, dinosaurs existed across the world. Even in New Zealand, we had a diverse and vast array of species, some of which existed nowhere else on Earth. Here is a compilation of some of the unique reptiles that once wandered the country, which represent not only some familiar figures from the big screen but also New Zealand’s distinct place in palaeontological history.
Ankylosaur
Greek: “Crooked Lizard”
Stars of the new Jurassic World film, a herd of ankylosaurs play football with two children on the “gyrosphere” attraction while trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid being eaten.
Ankylosauria are stocky, quadrupedal, herbivorous dinosaurs, known for having distinctive armour. This armour was actually bony osteoderms, forming structures called scutes and nodules. Scutes were large, elongated plates, organised in rows, while nodules filled the spaces between them. Members of the family ankylosauridae also had bony clubs on the end of their tails, which may have been used either for defending themselves against predators or for attracting a mate.
Ankylosaur bones were discovered by the late Dr Joan Wiffen, an amateur palaeontologist responsible for discovering the first dinosaur fossils in New Zealand. It is believed that the ankylosaur bones found in New Zealand were from a creature similar to minmi, a genus of small ankylosauria that lived in Australia during the late Cretaceous period. Features of the minmi include long legs for an ankylosaur, and a particularly small brain. These dinosaurs grew to be only about two metres long and one metre high at the shoulder.
Titanosaur
Greek: “Titanic Lizard”
Titanosaurs were a group of sauropods, herbivorous dinosaurs known for their long necks and tails, proportionately tiny heads and thick, sturdy legs. The titanosauria group included some of the heaviest land creatures that have ever existed, such as the argentinosaurus, a South American dinosaur estimated to have weighed between eighty and one hundred tonnes, with each vertebra as tall as a man.
It is unknown what species of titanosaur roamed New Zealand, as it is known from only a single tail bone. This bone was also found by Wiffen, during a routine fossil-hunting trip in northern Hawke’s Bay. It was discovered along the banks of a tributary of the Te Hoe river, inside a deposit of partially exposed sedimentary rock, “about the size of a rugby ball” according to discoverer Wiffen.
“I dug it out and asked a colleague to break it open with a hammer. I immediately saw a bone structure inside that looked different from the bone of a marine reptile. To be honest it’s a fairly nondescript and incomplete bone. It is heavily eroded and that’s because it must have been transported in a riverbed for some time before it was buried.”
Pterosaur
Greek: “Winged Lizard”
Featured for the first time in Jurassic Park II and appearing again in the latest film, pterosaurs are depicted as similar in behaviour to modern-day birds of prey. Their portrayal has been criticised by dinosaur experts as being highly inaccurate, and as failing to incorporate the extensive research that has taken place in the last forty years. Faults with their depiction in the films include teeth in toothless species, nesting behaviour since shown to be incorrect, and leathery, bat-like wings rather than the membranes of muscle fibre that pterosaurs actually required to fly.
Pterosaurs are commonly referred to as “flying dinosaurs”, but this is not technically correct. True dinosaurs belong to the clade dinosauria and have a common ancestor that distinguishes them from both pterosaurs and many marine reptiles, such as mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. As a group, they do hold the distinction of being the first vertebrate species able to fly. Pterosaurs are incredibly diverse in terms of size: the smallest had wingspans of 250 millimetres (approximately ten inches), while the largest had a wingspan of eighteen metres.
Evidence of pterosaur species in New Zealand includes the discovery of an arm bone and a tooth, likely belonging to a creature with a wingspan of about 3.75 metres. It quite possibly belonged to the group ornithocheiridae, which were among the last pterosaurs to have teeth.
Compsognathus
Greek: “Dainty Jaw”
While not featured in the latest addition to the Jurassic Park series, compsognathus appeared in the second and third instalments as tiny green carnivores, which first coordinated to attack a young girl, and then to run down and eat a prominent character. The compsognathus is also a common feature of many children’s dinosaur books, where it is referred to as the “chicken-sized” dinosaur. While the chicken-sized skeleton was later shown to be that of a juvenile, compsognathus was the smallest well-known species of dinosaur for almost a hundred years.
Based on the presence of small, intact lizard remains found inside one specimen, it is believed that the compsognathus was a quick, agile runner, most likely with excellent vision. It is also believed that they swallowed their prey whole. Their closest relative is believed by many palaeontologists to be the archeopteryx, also known as the “proto-bird”. This could mean that the compsognathus was a feathered dinosaur.
Compsognathus in New Zealand is known only from a single finger or toe bone found in Port Waikato. It was found surrounded by structures that are believed to be coprolites, or fossilised faeces. If this is the case, it is possibly the partially digested remains of a compsognathus excreted by a much larger carnivore living around Port Waikato during the late Jurassic period.
Kaiwhekea
Maori: “Squid-Eater”
Particularly relevant to the Otago region, we have the kaiwhekea. It is unique in that the single existing specimen is almost complete. It was found in the Katiki formation near Shag Point in Northern Otago, and collected and prepared by Arthur Cruickshank and Professor Ewan Fordyce of the University of Otago Geology Department.
The kaiwhekea is a genus of plesiosaur. Fordyce describes the classic plesiosaur as, “looking like a snake threaded through the body of a turtle, with four flippers that they flap up and down”. He describes the kaiwhekea as being of note because, “unlike other New Zealand plesiosaurs it has a pretty big skull, and it seemed not to have a really long neck. It seemed a bit different, that’s why we named it a new genus … Subsequent work by people in Britain and in South America has shown the kaiwhekea is probably a variety of a long-necked plesiosaur — called elasmosaurs. Basically, kaiwhekea is probably a strange and unusual type of elasmosaur, with a bigger head and shorter neck.”
The kaiwhekea’s name means squid-or-octopus eater. The conclusion that it ate soft-bodied prey, such as squid, was drawn from the skull’s small, interlocking teeth, which meant it was unlikely to be capable of crushing bones. “If we look at the teeth, we can see how they lived,” says Fordyce. “It might have eaten big prey, but I’d bet they were soft, or not particularly resistant.”
Despite recreations showing marine reptiles, such as plesiosaurs and Jurassic World stars mosasaurs, fighting or interacting, Fordyce believes it would be unlikely that the plesiosaur interacted with any other species in that manner. “It’s just good press, really.”
Honourable Mention:
Tuatara
Maori: “Peaks on the Back”
Although commonly referred to as a living dinosaur, the tuatara is actually the last surviving member of the order sphenodontia. Sphenodonts were plentiful, with a wide range of species, from the Middle Triassic to the Lower Cretaceous period, but around sixty million years ago, all species — with the exception of the tuatara — began to decline.
When the British Museum first received a skull in 1831, the tuatara were incorrectly classified as lizards. This was finally corrected in 1867, when German zoologist Albert Günther noted their skeletal similarities to birds, turtles and crocodilians. He proposed a new order of reptiles for tuatara and similar fossils, called rhynchocephalia (or “beak-head”). This order quickly became a dumping ground for distantly related species that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else, so in 1925 a new order was proposed that included only the tuatara and their closest fossil relatives, called sphenodontia (or “wedge-tooth”).
Tuatara used to live across the mainland of New Zealand, but today they can only be found in the wild on thirty-two islands. The reason for the decline of the tuatara is often cited as the presence of introduced mammalian predators, like the rat, which not only compete with the tuatara for invertebrate food sources but also prey on their eggs and young. While tuatara are generally safe from both competition and predation by mammals on the islands where they now reside, another significant threat their populations face is low genetic diversity. This has many wider implications for the species, from vulnerability, to new pathogens, to the ability to survive climate change.
New Zealand lacks the optimum conditions for fossilisation, meaning our fossil record is largely incomplete. According to Fordyce, “most of the rocks we have here in New Zealand are marine rocks that formed in shallow waters, near shore, or sometimes in deep waters”.
He did specify that we do have a certain quantity of non-marine rocks, which is the environment where dinosaurs would have lived. “Non-marine rocks generally aren’t good for preserving bones … In New Zealand, these rocks have a lot of coal in them, and if you have coal, you tend to have acidic ground water, and acidic ground water dissolves the bone. The fossil record is a bit biased — we have a good record of marine fossils because that’s where the bones tend to preserve well.”
Keeping this in mind, it’s completely possible that once, long ago, all manner of magnificent beasts roamed the lands we now call home, but that all traces of their life and existence have faded away. It is unlikely that we will ever know the true depth or complexity of prehistoric life in New Zealand.