Joan Wiffen

Joan Wiffen

… it was at last decided to try explosives to move and perhaps crack the boulder … Though large jagged chunks of rock still confronted us, we saw a massive amount of bones … With a coil of No. 8 fencing wire, we erected a kind of flying fox – the wire was tied between suitable trees along the route, finishing well up the ridge overlooking the fossil site. Then we all got to work, starting at the creek with bags and sacks, which we wrapped around the rough-edged rocks after getting them out of the water on to the narrow ledge alongside.

Collecting the first major mosasaur specimen from the Mangahoanga site in 1974, from Joan Wiffen, Valley of the Dragons, Random Century, 1991

Although shells embedded in hill rocks had intrigued her as a child, it was her husband’s enrolment at a geology night class that led to Joan Wiffen’s renaissance as a palaeontologist. When Pont was unwell, Wiffen went to the classes in his place, and found she ‘was green with envy when someone found a fossil nautoloid shell in a mudstone rock’.

A family visit to Australia included fossicking for minerals, and being gifted a large Walsh River ammonite, ‘… and suddenly, I was hooked. I knew what I wanted – to collect fossils’. Although there was no evidence that dinosaurs had ever lived in New Zealand, Charles Fleming, in 1967, had suggested that it could simply be because no one had yet found anything.

Inspired by a geological map indicating ‘reptilian bones in beds of brackish waters in the Te Hoe Valley’, Wiffen began her search close to home, at the Mangahouanga Stream in Hawke’s Bay. She first found marine fossils and then, in the late 1970s, came across a dinosaur vertebra in a boulder about 65 million years old. Identification of this first find, the tail vertebra of a theropod dinosaur, was confirmed in 1980 by Australian vertebrate palaeontologist Ralph Molnar.

Wiffen continued to explore the Mangahouanga site, finding other bones from both carnivore and herbivore dinosaurs, including theropods, a sauropod, a small hypsilophodont, an armoured ankylosaur and a flying reptile – the pterosaur. The fossils were hidden within hard, heavy, grey sandstone rocks, often in icy water, and Wiffen and her family and friends met with slippery and undercut banks, waterfalls, rapids and log jams. It was perseverance and passion that made Wiffen try acid extraction on one piece of rock, exposing the toe bone of a theropod. The technique was to cut and grind the rock on a masonry wheel, then to place it in the acid bath before working on it with a mini jack hammer, finally finishing it in the acid bath.

Wiffen’s fossil discoveries are now held in the palaeontology collection of GNS Science, in Lower Hutt, with some of her dinosaur bones on loan to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, where they are on display.

It is thanks to Joan Wiffen that it is now established that dinosaurs once walked in New Zealand. Dinosaur bones have since been found in other parts of New Zealand, and fossils of theropod dinosaurs were recently discovered on the Chatham Islands. The hunt goes on.  

By Rebecca Priestley

Medals and awards

Science & Technology Bronze Medal 1994, CBE 1994, Hon DSc (Massey) 1994

Further reading

Joan Wiffen, Valley of the Dragons: the story of New Zealand’s dinosaur woman, Random Century, 1991;

Paula Martin, Lives with Science: profiles of senior New Zealand women in science, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 1993;

Geoffrey Cox and Joan Wiffen, Dinosaur New Zealand, HarperCollins, 2002

Image courtesy Joan Wiffen

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