We ford the icy stream with the aid of guide wires and rope, and soon the hills resound with the throaty snarl of the converted chainsaw as Trevor attacks a split boulder. Hefting a rock-cutting saw, I follow Trevor Crabtree, a fellow enthusiast, down to what he calls “mosasaur beach.” Every step of the steep winding track has been worn into memory over the years that she, her late husband Pont and friends backpacked out more than 100 tonnes of fossil-bearing rock.Īn aluminium ladder-one of the many scavenged pieces of equipment that help lubricate this shoestring enterprise-extends down the cliff face to the river bed. Wiffen, 71 this year, and recently recovered from a knock-out dose of influenza, leans against a tree to catch her breath. To date, all the evidence has come from one place: the Mangahouanga stream bed, deep in the Urewera Ranges-a lush site that in the depths of winter looks uncannily as though lifted from the pages of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Now, thanks largely to the work of amateur palaeontologist Joan Wiffen and a handful of helpers, dinosaurs have begun to reclaim even this island vestige of Gondwana. ![]() ![]() ![]() Twenty years ago, such a scenario in New Zealand would have been unthinkable.
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