312 Transactions. — Geology. 



destroy them, unless we admit that the natives at a compara- 

 tively recent time assisted in their extermination, thereby 

 hastening the final disappearance of a group of dinornic birds, 

 which had inhabited an isolated land-area of limited extent 

 for such a length of time as sufficed for the development of at 

 least twenty well-defined forms or species, a large proportion 

 of which it will be seen were co-existent in this district. 



Mr. Park, in the Geological Eeports for 1887," gives an 

 instance of the finding of bird-bones in the brown sands near 

 Kai-iwi, "Wauganui, by Mr. Drew, an energetic collector in 

 that district ; and goes on to say, " On examination they were 

 identified as belonging to the latter" (small moa). This, I 

 believe, is the first discovery of fossil moa-bones in New Zea- 

 land. When I arrived in Napier some years ago, Mr. F. 

 Williams kindly showed me a block of sandy clay containing 

 a well-preserved femur of a moa, and also several fragments 

 of bone and some large pieces of egg-shells, all from one 

 locality. He stated that they had been dug out of a cliff on 

 the shore of the Inner Harbour, at an island called Te Ihu 

 te Otere. These specimens were then sent to the Colonial 

 Museum, at Wellington, where I saw them a short time ago. 

 I visited the place where the bones were found soon after- 

 wards, and succeeded in finding several fragments of bone and 

 plenty of egg-shell. 



The bones are found in the face of a high cliff formed of the 

 Petane marls, and lie, together with a few large pebbles or 

 shingle, at the bottom of a small valley of denudation which 

 has been filled in by subaerial formation similar to the Petane 

 clay and sand, containing fragments (blown ?) of Pecten novce- 

 zealandice and great numbers of two small land-shells, Therasia 

 thaisa and Helix rotundata. This filled-up valley has been cut 

 through at right angles by the denuding action of the waves, 

 which has determined the present coast-line of the harbour 

 and bay. The height from the top of the cliff to the bottom 

 of the "synclinal trough thus exposed is about 90ft., a few 

 feet at the top of the cliff being the prevalent superficial 

 pumice of the district, and which caps most of the high 

 country. 



At one of my visits to this interesting locality I found a 

 large block had fallen to the sea-level or beach (which is here 

 about 10ft. or 12ft. below the moa-bones), and on one face 

 of it I found a small femur which corresponds exactly with 

 the figure given by Owen of that of Notornis mantelli : this I 

 dug out carefully, and it is now in our Museum. Nearer the 

 surface of the water, where the boring crustaceans had begun 

 to riddle the block, I saw traces of egg-shell, and, examining it 



"Rep. Geol. Surv. of N.Z.," 1887, p. 63. 



