Page 6 - 2008 NZ Subantarctic Islands

After the great rending off, New Zealand was a “whale rider”

apart from the other sections of the supercontinent. Its plant and
animal life developed completely separately from the rest. Even

its geologic development was unlike the other remaining land
chunks. No mammal ever evolved in New Zealand with the

exception of three bat species, one of which is already extinct.
There are some amphibians and reptiles, but no snakes. There is
also a “living fossil” from the dinosaur age, the tuatara—an

iguana-like creature. Insects and plants evolved riotously on the
islands, but they are distinct from those elsewhere in the world.

But where Mother Nature produced the most flamboyant
evolutionary pattern is in the avian world. Birds have filled every

niche possible so that birds take the places usually occupied by
mammals or marsupials in other parts of the globe. Thus there are

birds that live like squirrels or others like forage like mice and
occupy similar homes. Most amazing is that many of these native
birds became flightless because there were no predators to create

an advantage to flight. No wonder pre-historic New Zealand is
described as a paradise for the creatures who lived there!

For millennia, that paradise continued undisturbed except by the

slow mechanisms of evolution, the alterations in weather
patterns, the uplifts and drops in the land caused by volcanic

activity and the pushing and shoving of plate tectonics. The plants
and animals were subject only to the dictates of Mother Nature.
1000 years ago, this paradise was invaded. Destroyed may be a

better term for it. How? Man arrived in the form of the
Polynesian wanderers and explorers we now call the Maori. With

man came annihilation. In the case of New Zealand, that
devastation took the form of extinction of species millions of

years in their development. 800 years after the Maoris, the
Europeans discovered New Zealand and more ruin was brought to

the lovely land and its vulnerable ecosystem.
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