Jurassic Park

In Waipara

John McCombe

God’s Marbles, in Waipara Valley, conceal marine fossils from the dinosaur era.

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Wayne Martin finds himself imagining a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth, as he discovers the secrets of Waipara Valley.

Jurassic Park

About 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled on land, the shallow seas of Zealandia teemed with their marine cousins. For more than 150 years, the bones of plesiosaurs, mosasaurs and a host of other creatures further down the food chain have been found in Waipara. One scientist called the district's Claremont Estate the richest depository of Cretaceous material in New Zealand. Yet, Claremont's rarest land form had its origins in the sky.

The K-T boundary kicks off my Land Rover safari with New Zealand dinosaur hunter Richard Goord. We're crossing part of the 970-hectare private nature reserve that surrounds Richard and wife Rosie's luxury Claremont Lodge, travelling through what has become a geological nirvana for generations of scientists and their students.

On a steep bank, across the gravel shallows of the Waipara River, a thin seam of rust-streaked clay bleeds into the underlying sediment. This 65-million-year-old sprinkling of cosmic dust is regarded as proof a meteorite strike wiped out the dinosaurs. The controversial theory was unveiled in 1980 by Luis and Walter Alvarez after they identified high concentrations of the meteorite element iridium in a K-T boundary in Italy. The clincher came 10 years later when a buried crater eight times the size of the Grand Canyon was discovered off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

We're looking at one of just seven K-T boundary sites in New Zealand and the best exposed in the Southern Hemisphere. The geological marker's existence in this country - half a world away from ground zero - is seen as proof of a global event.

The scenario is chilling. Travelling at more than 30 times the speed of sound, the meteorite strikes Yucatan with a force two million times greater than the world's most powerful nuclear bomb. Ninety thousand cubic kilometres of the earth's crust is vapourised instantly. Earth is consumed in a maelstrom of mega-tsunamis, forest-flattening winds, earthquakes and firestorms. A post-apocalyptic shroud of smoke and sulphurous dust triggers acid rains and the deep-frozen darkness of nuclear winter. Food chains collapse on land and sea. Ultimately, more than half of life on Earth is extinguished.

It's the kind of epic notion visitors encounter on Claremont's prehistoric nature trail. Armed with an interpretive map, guests can drive a Land Rover over formed tracks on the farm, stopping at various points to view the natural wonders on offer. Exclusive to lodge guests, the self-drive tour avoids driving in the riverbed and is a recent alternative to Claremont's legendary guided safari.

A short distance upstream, the quarry-like slopes of the late Cretaceous Conway Formation loom into view. White spherical boulders, some broken, lie scattered on the riverbed. At various heights in the ruffled cliff-face, similar boulders protrude like giant plugs in a dam.

Christened God's Marbles by Richard, the siltstone concretions contain marine fossils from the dinosaur era. Ranging up to two metres in diameter and weighing up to seven tonnes, the boulders formed on the ocean floor during the late Cretaceous period. Bone fragments shifting in the sediment accumulated deposits of calcium carbonate dissolved in the sea water. Over the millennia, God's Marbles grew like pearls to their current size.

One of New Zealand's earliest palaeontological discoveries was made here in 1872, when Alexander McKay found the remains of a young plesiosaur at Boby Stream. To date, more than 134 significant vertebrate fossils have been recovered, including mosasaurs, ammonites, the world's oldest penguin, and 17 species of prehistoric shark's teeth.

Discovered at Claremont in the 1980s, the new genus of penguin, Waimanu, is something of an avian missing link. Using the 60-million-year-old specimen as a genetic calibration point against modern birds, scientists have extrapolated the long-contended evolution of birds back into the age of dinosaurs. 

As recently as 2004, a University of Otago field party spotted a fossilised jawbone in a deep crack in a rock on the farm. Described by head of geology Ewan Fordyce as New Zealand's fossil find of the decade, the remains proved to be the metre-long skull of a 70-million-year-old mosasaur. 

*Read more about the amazing discoveries in March's Avenues*