Bit by bit its lands have thrust and dived, erupted and subsided, tilted and turned on its molten core.
About 200 million years ago there was just one supercontinent – Pangea – surrounded by ocean.
Just 40 million years later, thanks to huge movements in Earth’s crust, Pangea split apart into two supercontinents - Laurasia (today’s North American and Eurasia) and Gondwanaland.
Then, 80 million years ago, Gondwanaland itself began to crack and New Zealand became a gleam in Mother Earth’s eye. Over millions of years Gondwanaland split into the pieces that became South America, Africa, Antarctica, India, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Irian Jaya, and New Zealand.
As the ancient continent broke apart, each piece carried away its own cargo of animals and plants. Separated from their relatives, these animals and plants continued to evolve separately - travelling down different evolutionary paths.
New Zealand Today
Today New Zealand is a small archipelago in the South Pacific, about the same size as the British Isles or Japan.
Whichever way you look at it, New Zealand is remote. Since parting from Gondwanaland 80 million years ago, it steered away from other landmasses and well out into the Pacific, beginning the longest period of isolation of any non-polar landmass on earth.
This remoteness allowed evolution on land to take an eccentric course. Plants, animals and ecosystems developed that are so distinctive, New Zealand is like an island ‘Ark’ – it has a high percentage of native species that are found nowhere else (endemic), primitive and rare. By comparison, Great Britain, which separated from continental Europe only 10,000 years ago, has only two endemic species – one animal and one plant.
One of New Zealand's distinctive animals is the kiwi. Find out how kiwi came to be here. |