ARTICLES
The Skeleton in the Closet
By Eugene Kwok and Dr Jacqueline Nguyen
Solving the mystery of the museum’ s moa:
A large fossil pelvis and seven attached vertebrae were discovered decades ago hanging in an old locker in the Australian Museum. Nothing was known about these bones except that they belong to a moa, a large, extinct flightless bird that was unique to New Zealand. There were nine species of moa, ranging in weight from 12 to 250 kg. What species of moa did these bones come from? We did a bit of detective work to find out.
We began by studying the morphology of the mysterious fossil and compared it with moa specimens in the Museum’ s palaeontology collection. This allowed us to narrow down the fossil’ s identity to one of the three species in the moa genus Pachyornis.
After hanging in a locker for many years, the moa fossil has now found a new home in the Museum’ s Palaeontology collection.
Fossil pelvis and vertebrae of an ancient Moa View full size
Two species of New Zealand Moa View full size
Eugene Kwok is a Denison Research Scholarship student, University of Sydney
Jacqueline Nguyen restoring the ancient moa pelvis and vertebrae
Dr Jacqueline Nguyen is a Research Scientist( Ornithology and Palaeontology) at the AMRI.
Based on the dark sediment that had been stuck to the fossil, we could tell that the moa came from a swampy environment. We used X-ray diffraction to find out what minerals were present in the sediment. This revealed the presence of the mineral mica, which is typical of moa fossil sites on the South Island of New Zealand.
Together, all of these pieces of evidence suggest that the fossil is from a Heavy-footed Moa( Pachyornis elephantopus). This was one of the largest species of moa, weighing up to 163 kg, and went extinct about 500 to 600 years ago.
This article was first published by the Australian Museum Research Institute on 20th April, 2018.
SEN and the Science Teachers’ Association of NSW are grateful to the Australian Museum and its Research Staff for permitting us to republish several of its many fine scientific articles. We also thank the authors, Eugene Kwok and Jacqueline Nguyen, for supplying this article.
38 SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL NEWS VOL 67 NO 2