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Speaker 1: Hever dupis Ellen nineteen past five. Now this may shock

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Speaker 1: a few. Apparently the Kiwi and the Tarker hair and

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Speaker 1: the moor are not actually Kiwi birds. They are Australian birds.

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Speaker 1: A team of paleontologists have been excavating a fossil site

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Speaker 1: in central Otago since two thousand and one. Of this

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Speaker 1: is their latest discovery, and Canterbury Museum Seen You Curative

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Speaker 1: Natural History Paul Scofield was involved in the excavation with us. Now, hey,

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Speaker 1: Paul Beday, how's it going good? Thank you? How long

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Speaker 1: ago did these birds come to New Zealand?

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Speaker 2: Then, well, it differs for different species that we believe

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Speaker 2: them are in. The Kiwi probably got here about thirty

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Speaker 2: million years ago, but some of the others, like Tarka

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Speaker 2: were probably quite recent blow ins, maybe only two or

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Speaker 2: three million years ago. So, as you well know, there's

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Speaker 2: this east westerly drift from Australia and right across the

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Speaker 2: Southern Ocean, and it appears that the species have been

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Speaker 2: arriving in New Zealand ever since we drifted away from

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Speaker 2: Gondwana land. So the really surprising thing from our point

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Speaker 2: of view is the fact that that many of the

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Speaker 2: species that we considered to be sort of traditional kiwis.

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Speaker 1: Are you there, Paul, Have we lost you? Oh no,

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Speaker 1: we've got you. Sorry, your line's cutting in out a

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Speaker 1: little bit.

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Speaker 2: Sorry.

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Speaker 1: If no, that's not your fault. Don't you worry about it.

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Speaker 1: If if, if these birds are actually originally deporties from Australia,

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Speaker 1: then should the car cup or actually be our national bird?

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Speaker 2: Well it's it's got a lot of the same characteristics

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Speaker 2: as the kiwi. It's nocturnal and it's also flightless. And

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Speaker 2: the carp really is from from both the DNA and

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Speaker 2: the fossil record. We know that it's been here for

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Speaker 2: so so long, and it's really quite unique. And but

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Speaker 2: there's other really interesting birds similarly. There's the the little wrens,

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Speaker 2: the riflemen, and the bush and the bush wren and

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Speaker 2: the rock creant, and that they are also long term

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Speaker 2: New Zealand residents. I've been here for sixty million years.

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Speaker 1: Okay, Hey, what happened to the crocs that we used

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Speaker 1: to have?

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Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, So there's another really exciting thing. We had

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Speaker 2: two species of crocodile and we believe that they most

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Speaker 2: likely became extinct at the beginning of the ice ages

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Speaker 2: about two million years ago to or three million years ago,

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Speaker 2: so central Otigo. When at the time we were digging

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Speaker 2: twenty million years ago, it was really quite warm. It

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Speaker 2: was like North North and New South Wales or southern Queensland.

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Speaker 2: But as soon as the glaciations came along, things really

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Speaker 2: cooled down and got to the point where the crocodile

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Speaker 2: simply couldn't survive.

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Speaker 1: I see Paul, thank you for running us. We'd appreciated

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Speaker 1: Doctor Paul Schofield, Senior Curator of Natural History at Canterbury Museum.

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