Victoria University summer scholar Laura Wilson has spent two months sorting through a box of bones and dirt. The aim? To identify and catalogue the huge array of species represented in Martinborough’s Cave of Bones.
How many species do you think are in this box?
Three years ago, Curator Vertebrates Alan Tennyson retrieved this sample from a cave in Martinborough.
Even without cleaning, Alan could identify the beak of kākāpō, Finsch’s duck leg bones, and even a tuatara jaw.
It’s a huge amount of work to clean, sort, and identify species in a sample such as this – and it’s with the help of volunteers and summer scholars, such as Laura Wilson from Victoria University, that this work can happen.
Cleaning, identifying, and sorting
Cleaning
Laura’s first step was to wash everything using water and a toothbrush – which took about a week due to the number of small fragments.
“This cave has been sampled for over 100 years, but people tended to only take the big bones, rather than the tiny ones,” she says. “So it was really important to represent small species properly this time around.
“I picked up everything that was bigger than 1mm by using a sieve with a really small mesh. This ensured that the tiny lizard and frog bones didn’t fall through the gaps with the rest of the crud.
“I also wanted to catch tiny flakes of bone, because we know they still have DNA in them that can be identified one day.”
After the cleaning and sieving, Laura removed the large pieces of bones, and then began to pick through tens of thousands of tiny pieces to decipher whether they were animal remains, seeds … “Anything worth keeping that gives a clearer picture of the cave environment,” she says.
Sorting
Laura then sorted everything into different elements to make it easier to compare bones when it came to identification.
She removed ones that are impossible to identify without DNA testing (like toes!). “I learnt so much about bird anatomy,” she says.
Identification
Laura then had the huge job of identifying the bones.
“I started out comparing with species previously found in the cave,” she says.
Vertebrate curator Alan Tennyson taught Laura how to identify species. This included identifying distinct features that different groups of birds have.
“You basically just hold up already identified bones until you get a match!” Laura says. “First, go by size, because the bigger bones can only be a certain number of things.”
The results
The results from the identification show that pretty much anything that fell in this cave couldn’t get out, Alan says.
“When you look at the make-up of the fauna it’s mostly flightless things,” he says.
Laura and Alan have concluded that approximately 18 species were in this one box. This includes at least 13 species of bird and 41 individual birds.
Those species include:
- 12 Finsch’s ducks
- 6 weka
- 5 kākāpō
- 5 kiore (rats)
- 4 Hodgens’ waterhens
- 3 rowi kiwi
- 2 North Island takahē/mōho
- 2 snipe rails
- 2 New Zealand coots
- 2 tuatara
- 1 paradise shelduck
- 1 North Island adzebill
- 1 owlet-nightjar
- 1 bush wren
- 1 North Island saddleback
In addition, Laura and Alan identified 4 gecko bones, 24 skink bones, and 25 frog bones.
And Mollusc expert Bruce Marshall identified 9 species of tiny native land snail.
“All the extinct flightless rails from the North Island are sitting right here,” Alan says. “And there are also so many Finsch’s ducks, presumably they were really common – which is possibly not what you’d expect in a native forest.”
Laura’s favourite species from the box is the owlet-nightjar. “I didn’t even know it existed before this!” she says.
Alan’s highlights are the frog and lizard bones, because generally they don’t preserve as well as this.
“This particular site is perhaps the best site in New Zealand for getting DNA out of bones – it’s so well preserved. So these bones are so genetically valuable,” he says.
“I know there’re a few gems still in here that I need to identify. And even the pieces that are too small to identify, we’ll keep – there’s DNA in them and techniques these days which are really efficient. You can essentially run them though a machine and it will spit out their identities.”
Overall, Laura identified 740 bones. “122 of these were from animals like sheep though …” Laura says.
Thanks to Laura for all her hard work and to Victoria University who we partner with for their Summer Research Scholarships initiative.
If you’re a student at VUW and would like to work on a project with Te Papa’s scientists, keep an eye out for the next call, which will happen in the second half of this year.
Further thanks
We’d also like to acknowledge Clint Easton, Andrew Veale, Kristina Aluzaite, and Sam Tennyson who helped collect this sample from the cave; also James Crampton at Victoria University for assisting with Laura’s supervision.