New Zealand’s native biodiversity is more primitive than most other countries. While the rest of the world has many flowering plants and many mammals, New Zealand’s plants and large animals make up barely 3700 of the land-based species.

Among these are only two native land mammals – tiny bats.

It all began when New Zealand split off from the rest of Gondwanaland 80 million years ago, taking its lands and species off on an evolutionary tangent. Left to itself, without humans arriving, New Zealand would have continued to depart from the evolutionary mainstream.

Dominated by Birds
A key feature in New Zealand is the role of birds. Before people and their mammalian friends arrived, New Zealand was bird-dominated, almost free of land mammals. For 65 million years other species were left to adapt and fill the niches that mammals elsewhere fill. One of these is the kiwi, sometimes known as an honorary mammal because of its unbird-like attributes.

Kiwi are a ratite and, even though they are New Zealand's national icon, there is still some debate over just how they came to be here.