Tuatara fossil props up Moa's Ark theory for NZ animal live

TV3 (New Zealand) ^ | Wed, Jan 21 2009 21h09 | NZPA

[DieHard the Hunter]

Tuatara fossil props up Moa's Ark theory for NZ animal life

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 9:09p.m.

The discovery of a tuatara fossil in the South Island is helping prop up the "Moa's Ark" theory that some parts of New Zealand have always stayed above the sea surface.

Scientists said the fossil provided strong evidence that the ancestor of the present-day tuatara covered the Zealandia landmass as it split from Gondwana, 82 million years ago.

[DieHard the Hunter]

Tuatara are amazing animals: they are reptiles, but not lizards. Having seen ahd held one of these rare and amazing creatures I became absolutely convinced in the truth of Dinosaurs and the fact that Evolution and Creation must be interlinking and co-dependent processes.

Photo at source

(BTW, a Moa is a giant extinct flightless bird that roamed New Zealand as recently as 700 years ago. There are sometimes claims of actual sightings in deep bush (lots of that here in NZ) but these aren't really considered credible. They were hunted to extinction by the Maori.

[DieHard the Hunter]

Ping

[BlazingArizona]

Since all of NZ is made of greywacke - fossilized mud, with recent volcanic intrusions, how could it have formed above water?

[DieHard the Hunter]

> Since all of NZ is made of greywacke - fossilized mud, with recent volcanic intrusions, how could it have formed above water?

Excellent question to which I don’t know the answer. I suspect not all of New Zealand is formed of fossilized mud: the Southern Alps, for example, are created from two tectonic plates pushing into each other. IIRC that would be igneous rock down there.

With a few exceptions (eg Mt Cook/Aoraki, Mt Taranaki, Mt Ruapehu) our volcanic activity happens on the upper half of North Island, from Taupo thru to Whangarei.

[BlazingArizona]

Excellent question to which I don’t know the answer. I suspect not all of New Zealand is formed of fossilized mud: the Southern Alps, for example, are created from two tectonic plates pushing into each other. IIRC that would be igneous rock down there.

The mud that formed the greywacke came from the ground-down remnants of Gondwanaland. The volcanic activity came much more recently. It happened that MZ was formed at the edge of 2 (perhaps 3) tectonic plates, so as time went on a tectonic fault developed that runs through Wellington and South Island.

[DieHard the Hunter]

> The mud that formed the greywacke came from the ground-down remnants of Gondwanaland. The volcanic activity came much more recently. It happened that MZ was formed at the edge of 2 (perhaps 3) tectonic plates, so as time went on a tectonic fault developed that runs through Wellington and South Island.

I’ll have to take your word on that, as I know very little about geology. What I do know is that our native Flora and Fauna are found nowhere else on earth — except, interestingly, there is a pre-historic bug in South Africa that is very similar to our Weta.

Apparently, our dinosaur fossils are unique, too.

This means that Noah would have required a large motor on his Ark to drop off all of our animals and then somehow get back to Mt Ararat in time for the waters to recede. Either that, or our animals evolved here in situ. Either that, or the Genesis Flood was restricted to a much smaller area and was not universal.

[Fraxinus]

My personal view is that NZ is a continental fragment of potentially great age. The creation and persistence of continental fragments is very poorly covered in the popular literature. NZ is not the only one and potentially not the largest (Greenland?), I have seen references that call the Greater Antilles continental fragments (semi-independant ones at that).

[SunkenCiv]

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	Gods Graves Glyphs	Thanks DieHard the Hunter. Gotta ping this for the title alone -- "Moa's Ark". :') Also a possible ping for the Catastrophism list. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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[Fred Nerks]

“...My personal view is that NZ is a continental fragment of potentially great age...”

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http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/fliers/97mgg03.html

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http://topex.ucsd.edu/marine_grav/mar_grav.html