Vol. L, No. 3, N.Z. JOUBNAL OF SCIENCE (New Issue) MAY, 1891. 



THE MO A IN AUSTRALIA. 



BY C. W. De VIS, M.A., Queensland Museum. 



Recent discovery in Lord Howe's Island has proved that post- 

 tertiary Australia extended far to the east of its present shores. 

 Still it remains true that if among the results of enquiry into the past 

 phases of Australian life there be one suggestive of the possible 

 inter-relation of faunas apparently as distinct in history as in location, 

 it is the discovery of a bird identical with the Moas of New Zealand, 

 and of others so near akin to them as to have been pardonably 

 mistaken for them by acute observers. Fossils so like Moa bones as 

 the latter must necessarily have been, clearly show that the evolution 

 of these grand birds was not initiated in their recent island home, but 

 that it had already made considerable progress in that portion of a 

 far-reaching continent which we now name Australia, when a period 

 was put to the Nototherian age bj r desolating outflows of lava over 

 the greater part of the land. Having regard to the improbability of 

 birds so organized effecting a passage over sea under any ordinary 

 circumstances, we can hardly escape the further conclusion that New 

 Zealand's entire separation from the continental area was brought 

 about in time not more remote than that era of intense volcanic 

 activity ; one is even tempted to surmise, and it appears very 

 possible to do so without absurdity, that it was one among the conse- 

 quences of that very manifestation of energy. But this is an instance 

 of speaking without book on a question which should be rigorously, 

 as it may be confidently, left for decision in the hands of New 

 Zealand geologists. Cumulative evidence to the same effect but still 

 more explicit in kind is yielded by a relic of a true Dinornis. From it 

 we gather that the process of evolution had in the self-same place 

 and time accomplished more than we could have justly anticipated 

 without such warrant — the production of that more complete depar- 

 ture from the rest of the Struthionidce which we recognize in the Moa 

 type. And again, as the ' wolves ' and ' devils ' of Tasmania, the 

 ' crowned pigeons ' of New Guinea, and the ' wallabies ' of those and 

 other Pacific islands have been cut off from the common ancestral 

 seat of their genera, so also have the Moas. 



It is indeed somewhat strange that the notion of the same genus 

 of birds existing at one time in Australia and at a later period in 

 New Zealand should ever have been thought inadmissable — yet it is 

 difficult to see what other conception of the case could have been in 

 the mind of Sir Richard Owen when he spoke of the advent of an 

 Australian moa as ' an exceptional extension' of a New Zealand genus 

 to Australia.' At the same time it is by no means to be regretted 

 that Owen did take this view, and that in consequence he regarded 

 with suspicion any Australian claim to Moa rank, however well 

 accredited It is to the stimulation of his critical faculty by incre- 

 dulity that we owe the full assurance that there has existed a bird 

 which, though not Dinornis, had much in it pertaining to Dinornis, a 



