Chatham dinosaurs bewilder islanders

A breakthrough find of dinosaur bones has delighted New Zealand palaeontologists, but Chatham Islanders appeared bewildered by all the fuss yesterday.

"We really haven't heard much about it," said Elizabeth Day, whose parents own the Waitangi Cafe on the Chathams group, which are 800km east of New Zealand.

Dr Jeffrey Stilwell, of Melbourne's Monash University, discovered the theropod bones on the islands, but New Zealand can claim some of the glory - we helped to train him.

Dr Stilwell did his PhD under Otago University associate professor of palaeontology Ewan Fordyce, this country's leading palaeontologist.

Dr Fordyce said Dr Stilwell had "struck gold" by finding the 2km-long deposit of dinosaur bones.

"What Dr Stilwell and his team have done is important in coming up with tangible identifications that add significantly to the story of dinosaurs in the southwest Pacific," he said.

GNS Science palaeontologist Dr Hamish Campbell said the find was immensely significant.

"This is only the third known dinosaur locality in New Zealand so it's great news."

One of the few previous finds of a land dinosaur was a bone found by New Zealand amateur palaeontologist Joan Wiffen, of Havelock North.

Until her first find at the Mangahouanga Stream site in Hawkes Bay, it was thought that New Zealand probably had not had dinosaurs.

Apart from Dr Wiffen's Hawkes Bay site and now the Chathams, one dinosaur bone has previously been found at Port Waikato on the west coast of the North Island.

At least three kinds of carnivorous and herbivorous dinosaur, one kind of flying reptile and marine reptiles such as mosasaurs and elasmosaurs have been found at the Chathams site.

Theropods were two-legged and big-brained, about 4m long and weighed up to four tonnes.