168 Transactions. — Zoology. 



dried skin, with feathers, in the Dunstan district : ■■'■ and in 

 the same year the neck of S. crassus now in the Otago 

 University Museum was found in Earnscleugh Cave, u.ear 

 Alexandra.! In 1874 the leg of D. potens, also in the 

 Otago Museum, was found by Mr. Allen in the Knobby 

 Ranges. :[ In 1878 Mr. Squires found near Queenstown the 

 leg, head, and neck of M. didimis, now in the British 

 Museum ;§ and in 1884 Mr. Brandford discovered the leg 

 of E. elephantojnis which is now in the Cambridge University 

 Museum, in a cave in the Kemarkable Mountains, near Queens- 

 town. 1 1 



Certainly it does not seem probable, at first sight, that 

 these remains can be very old ; but, under exceptional circum- 

 stances, skin, cartilage, and tendon are known to have been 

 preserved in other places for many hundreds of years.** 

 Now, it must be noticed that all the specimens just men- 

 tioned have been found in a limited district in central Otago, 

 about sixty miles long and forty miles broad, which lies be- 

 tween Lake Wakatipu and the Lammerlaw Eange. So that 

 either the birds survived much longer in this district than in 

 other places, it or the remains have been better preserved here 

 than elsewhere. The fact that those bones of the Knobby 

 Eange specimen which were exposed to the sun were as much 

 decayed as ordinary moa-bones found on the surface, makes 

 the latter supposition the more probable one ; and there are 

 other reasons for coming to the same conclusion. If these 

 remains have not been preserved under special circumstances 

 the birds cannot have been dead more than a few score years 

 at the most : but if they had been alive fifty years before they 

 were found it is certain that the Maoris of Canterbury and 

 Otago would have known that the moas survived longer in 

 central Otago than elsewhere ; and yet there is no tradition to 

 that effect. On the other hand, the district in which all these 



* Trans. N.Z. Inst., vol. iv., p. 114. 



t Trans. N.Z. Inst., vol. iv., p. 115. With the moa-remains were 

 found remains of an extinct duck {Anas finschi), also with dried liga- 

 ments ; Cnemiornis ; and the remains of an extinct lizard, about the size 

 of the tuatara, but with pleurodont teeth (I.e., vol. vii., p. 139) — perhaps 

 one of the lizards mentioned by Mr. Stack (I.e., vol, vii., p. 295). 



+ Trans. N.Z. Inst., vol. vii., p. 266; Nature, Feb. 11, 1875 ; BuUer, 

 Birds of New Zealand, 2nd ed., vol. i., p. xxxi., and woodcut from 'La 

 Nature.' 



§ Trans. Zool. Soc, vol.xi., p. 257. 



11 BuUer, Birds of N.Z., 2nd ed., vol. i., p. xxxii. 



*• See Haast, Trans, N.Z. Inst., vol. vii., p. 97, and " Geology of Can- 

 terbury," p. 442. 



tt The supposed footprints referred to by Hochstctter in "New Zea- 

 land," p. 191, footnote, was a joke perpetrated by Sir. Maling, a surveyor, 

 who had assisted Dr. Haast in digging out the caves near CoUingvvood. 



