In Northeastern New Zealand there's a place in inland Hawke's Bay
where New Zealand's only dinosaur fossils have come from.
There's a remote valley, the Mangahoanga valley in the dense bush country.
John Wiffen and her colleagues over many years
have extracted a lot of the bones of fossil marine reptiles
that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, and dinosaur bones.
New Zealand's only dinosaur bones come from this remote place.
The geology there is just right for finding these things.
These are these are animals that lived about 80 million years ago.
It's way out in the mountains in very dense forest
it's about two and a half hours drive from Napier
but it's think New Zealand forest, it's jungles-like.
it's hung with vines and creepers and it's hard to get in there.
The streams in the bottom are quite deep gorges
with big pools and waterfalls and so to get there you have to walk.
At one point, to get through a gorge, we took in some tyre tubes
which were hard pushing through that sort of jungle.
And we floated down the gorge which is really the only way to get to see that stuff
and in fact we're pretty confident that we're the first geologists that have ever been to some of these places.
Some of these valleys probably haven't ever been visited by people before
or for hundreds of years maybe, but certainly no geologists.
So we went in there looking for fossils.
We know that Joan Wiffen and her colleagues
could access certain areas of the stream bed and they got these amazing fossils out.
But there were large areas upstream that they really couldn't get to.
Some of the things Joan found, for example this big toothy thing,
this is part of the lower jaw of a thing called a mosasaur
which was really a giant lizard, they were related to the lizards but they lived in the sea.
And obviously they were very big, some of them were enormous.
They were the absolute top predators that lived in the sea during the time of the dinosaurs.
here's part of a dinosaur bone, one of the few dinosaur bones from New Zealand
and it doesn't look like much, buit's part of a bone from a titanosaur.
the titanosaurs belonged to the group of dinosaurs that were land dwelling,
things called sauropods were the ones with the big bodies long skinny necks and the long skinny tails.
They were huge. some of them the biggest land then animals that have ever lived.
This is part of the vertebrae, it's very worn
because it was a bone that had washed down the river into the sea.
So the titanosaur died on land somewhere near a river,
the next flood came along and washed some of its bones down the stream.
So is part of the vertebrae, the backbone of a titanosaur.
Here's another bone that Joan found, a really important fossil bone.
This again is not dinosaur, this is one of the group of pterosaurs, the flying reptiles
and again, technically speaking, they were not dinosaurs
but giant flying reptiles that lived at the same time.
Again, some of these things were enormous,
some pterosaurs had wingspans of up to 12 meters.
So we went into the headwaters of this stream where John was collecting
and we found all sorts of stuff.
This is a boulder that was in the stream bed, washed down the stream,
but you see it contains lots of big chunks of bone
each one of these is part of the vertebrae or the backbone
of one of these large marine reptiles.
Here's something else one of us found on this field trip
and this rock is interesting.
The rock was a ball shaped rock, what we call a concretion
and the rock is really really hard.
This one was split open and you can see that it contains a bone.
When the rock split, it split right through the middle of the bone
and this again is a part of a backbone, and in cross section,
so that hole is where that the spinal cord went through
and this is the shape of the vertebrae,
the vertebrae has the spine on top and these wings outside,
there a whole load of vertebrate stuck together.
We have no idea what this is. it's a curious bone,
it looks different from the vertebrae of all the other fossils we found,
so we're not yet sure what this is,
and that's something we'll be trying to find out.