Mr Moa: The man who handled almost every moa bone collected in New Zealand

Friday, 10 July 2020

WORTHY FIND: This giant moa skeleton was found in 1982 in a Waitomo cave by part-time museum worker Trevor Worthy.

Just by looking at a moa bone, Trevor Worthy can determine what species it is.

That’s part of the reason why he’s known as Mr Moa – an endearing and “quirky” name he’s taken in his stride.

Identifying the bones isn’t easy – major leg bones are relatively easy, ribs are a bit more difficult – and some researchers still make mistakes. But advanced technology has made the whole process a lot simpler than when Worthy first started out.

After stumbling across his first bone while exploring caves during his university days, Worthy was hooked and eager to learn more.

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Over the years, after holding several contract positions with museums around the country – he’s never held a permanent job – Worthy helped identify almost every moa bone collected in the country.

Trevor Worthy - AKA Mr Moa - has been working in Australia for the past 15 years, researching some of their extinct species.

“In collections there's … several thousands that I've actually handled and looked at and made an opinion on what they are,” he told Stuff.

FIXING HISTORY AND MAKING IT

Some collections, which began being built in the 19th Century, included full skeletons. But not all parts were from the same bird.

“When I first started looking at the Canterbury Museum collections, there were many skeletons … built by [Sir Julius von Haast] and others in the 19th Century.

“By built what I mean is they had gone into a swamp and pulled out thousands of bones … joined them up and said this is a skeleton. There was very often bones of three species in that pile.”

Moa skeletons on display at Te Papaâs Te Taiao Nature exhibition.

So, in the late 80s and 90s, he began taking apart the collections, reidentifying the bones and rebuilding the skeletons. His research and identification mark can still be found on collections in museums across the country.

In 1982, while working part time for the Waitomo Caves Museum, Worthy found his first full skeleton – a dinornis – in Briars Cave.

The skeleton was later identified as a female. Further research found there were two different species for each island, contradicting initial beliefs there was just one spanning the entire country.

“Now we know that basically there’s only one in each island and there’s a very large size range.

”We have a whole understanding now that these birds are basically typical animals, they had a size range and in different parts of the country they had a different size range.”

Dinornis weighed between 56kg and 249kg and reached 90cm to 200cm in height. Females, like the one Worthy found, were up to three times the mass of males.

Those found in Canterbury were the biggest of the species, but further inland, the size of the animals dropped by 50 per cent, Worthy said.

“This wasn't able to be understood until we got molecular data from genetics.”

From the early 90s, they had the ability to extract DNA from the bones and learn more about the animals’ origins. Further progress over the years has allowed researchers to identify moa droppings and see what the bird had eaten all those years ago.

“[It’s been an] exciting couple of decades with these new technologies available.

“We can now talk about these things as ecological units [and] know the role they have in that ecosystem.”

Worthy said it was really rare to find a full skeleton back then. At the time, there were probably only half a dozen complete skeletons in the North Island, and for the dinornis, possibly only two.

This one practically fell into his lap - he climbed down a hole while caving and stumbled upon it.

Thirty-eight years later, finding complete skeletons is still a rarity. Worthy said there remains one species that still doesn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle.

“You can get to 90 per cent [complete] … [it’s] hard getting that last [piece].”

“If you haven’t got all the vertebrate you don’t even know how many vertebrate they have.”

After discovering the dinornis skeleton, he found that it had more vertebrate than its brother and sister species – 29 to their 27.

That makes a “fundamental difference”, he said.

When he started out in the palaeontology industry, 29 different moa species had been identified in New Zealand, and were believed to be related to kiwis.

“People assume that the kiwis and moas on New Zealand were related to each other and the emu and cassowary [in Australia are related]. That's all wrong.”

There are actually only nine moa species in New Zealand, and they are closely related to South America’s tinamou. They were believed to have flown to New Zealand around 50 million years ago, after Gondwana separated.

NOT A ‘GOOD’ STUDENT

Worthy admitted he “wasn’t a very good student” at Waikato University where he studied a general science degree. But he achieved his Bachelor’s degree and went on to study further – he said he just “scraped in” for his Masters.

Caving was a pastime for him while studying, but when he started finding moa bones it soon became his career.

“I was more interested in caving [than university], so I went down to Waitomo and got a job.”

He began exploring the caves to build the Waitomo Caves Museum’s collection, and also highlight the importance caves played in fossilising New Zealand’s history.

After his stint there, he was inspired to go back to university and achieve a palaeontology qualification. Since graduating, he has never held a tenured job.

“It’s been an interesting journey,” he said.

“Science is something I’ve done … basically for the love of it. It’s been really interesting and really rewarding but I've never had a job other than a contract from three years at most, at a time.”

His love for collecting interesting elements was fostered from a young age. His grandmother was a renowned shell collector who sparked and encouraged his interest, Worthy Said.

”I always had a [love] for natural history.”

When he was at boarding school in Whangārei he joined a local ornithology group that patrolled beaches looking for dead birds to identify what kind of species were travelling along New Zealand’s coast.

He admitted it was just a way for him to get out of the boarding house and get some fresh air, but it too nurtured his interest in palaeontology.

JUMPING SPECIES

Mr Moa left New Zealand in 2005 after government funding for his research ran out and wasn’t renewed.

He jumped the ditch, started undertaking his PhD in Adelaide, South Australia, and found another extinct native to research - Australia’s second largest flightless bird, the dromornithidae.

“There’s no moas, but we do have a giant bird, the giant birds here are something I've be chasing,” he said.

The dromornithidae, otherwise known as mihirungs, demon ducks or thunder birds, are giant foals related to chickens and geese. They were just as big as moas – sometimes even bigger.

According to the Australian Museum, dromornis stirtoni weighed between 450kg and 500kg and were over three metres tall.

When Worthy began researching the species, there was just one other like-minded palaeontologist in the country. Over the years, through Flinders University, he has brought on numerous student researchers and found fossil deposits dating back 25 million years in South Australia.

“There's lots of projects we can do to understand the history of how Australian birds came to be what are.”

While he might have moved on from moas, Worthy is still concerned about the unethical distribution and trade of moa bones in New Zealand.

“Virtually all folk selling them only want to make money and reduce these objects to purely mantle shelf objects with no further value than that they are a moa bone.

“Most sellers are incapable of even telling the species concerned and often have even cows or other bones mixed with the real moa bones.”

Worthy supports the push from the Department of Conservation to make selling the bones illegal.

”The smuggling and destruction of bones will likely lead to major loss of scientific research potential for the nation of [New Zealand] and its population leading into the future – and for what[?] The selfish aims of an individual making a few paltry dollars for themselves.”