Joan Wiffen stands in Mangahouanga Stream in the hills of Hawke’s Bay, where she found New Zealand’s first dinosaur fossils in 1975. Listen to her talk about her family's first visit there.
Transcript
Our interest had been aroused in fossils and we saw this little note on the geological map, magic words it said, saurian bones in brackish water in the Tihoi Valley. Perhaps I was overendowed with imagination but that was really the sort of key and so I said right well we'll gonna have a look at that, we might find ourselves a dinosaur. And we came and we're still here 25 years later.
Interviewer: What did you find when you first arrived?
Well we went down off the road by the bridge where the first day my family and I arrived and it was bit like opening up the Christmas stocking. The rocks under the bridge were coated with fossils. All kinds of fossils: sharks teeth, fish teeth, vertebrates, ammonites all manner of things like that. And it was late in the afternoon and the showers were starting to come round the hill the mist was folding down and we thought, oh we can't go now, we've just got here and there was so many treasures there just waiting to be discovered. So we put our little tent up and shortly after making a fire, boiling a billy having a bit of tea, we crawled into this little tent into our sleeping bags. And we were so excited. We weren't in the least concern that we didn't find bones straight away.
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