The University of Otago is a public research collegiate university based in Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand. Founded in 1869, Otago is New Zealand's oldest University and one of the oldest universities in Oceania.
A Lagerstätte or fossil bed is a sedimentary deposit that exhibits extraordinary fossils with exceptional preservation—sometimes including preserved soft tissues. These formations may have resulted from carcass burial in an anoxic environment with minimal bacteria, thus delaying the decomposition of both gross and fine biological features until long after a durable impression was created in the surrounding matrix. Lagerstätten span geological time from the Neoproterozoic era to the present. Worldwide, some of the best examples of near-perfect fossilization are the Cambrian Maotianshan shales and Burgess Shale, the Ordovician Soom Shale, the Silurian Waukesha Biota, the Devonian Hunsrück Slates and Gogo Formation, the Carboniferous Mazon Creek, the Triassic Madygen Formation, the Jurassic Posidonia Shale and Solnhofen Limestone, the Cretaceous Yixian, Santana, and Agua Nueva formations, the Eocene Green River Formation, the Miocene Foulden Maar and Ashfall Fossil Beds, the Pliocene Gray Fossil Site, the Pleistocene Naracoorte Caves, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Tanis Fossil Site.
The South Island takahē is a flightless swamphen indigenous to New Zealand and the largest living member of the rail family. It is often known by the abbreviated name takahē, which it shares with the recently extinct North Island takahē. The two takahē species are also known as notornis.
Clayton James Cosgrove is a former New Zealand politician. He is a member of the Labour Party.
The natural history of New Zealand began when the landmass Zealandia broke away from the supercontinent Gondwana in the Cretaceous period. Before this time, Zealandia shared its past with Australia and Antarctica. Since this separation, the New Zealand landscape has evolved in physical isolation, although much of its current biota has more recent connections with species on other landmasses. The exclusively natural history of the country ended in about 1300 AD, when humans first settled, and the country's environmental history began. The period from 1300 AD to today coincides with the extinction of many of New Zealand's unique species that had evolved there.
Dudley Benson is a New Zealand musician and bar director from Christchurch, New Zealand. Benson released his debut album The Awakening in 2008, through his own independent label Golden Retriever Records, following this up with Forest: Songs by Hirini Melbourne in 2010 and Zealandia in 2018. In 2014 he won an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award. Since 2020, Benson has been a co-director of Woof!, a cocktail bar in Dunedin.
Zealandia, also known as Te Riu-a-Māui (Māori) or Tasmantis, is an almost entirely submerged mass of continental crust in Oceania that subsided after breaking away from Gondwanaland 83–79 million years ago. It has been described variously as a submerged continent, continental fragment, and microcontinent. The name and concept for Zealandia was proposed by Bruce Luyendyk in 1995, and satellite imagery shows it to be almost the size of Australia. A 2021 study suggests Zealandia is 1 billion years old, about twice as old as geologists previously thought.
The geology of New Zealand is noted for its volcanic activity, earthquakes and geothermal areas because of its position on the boundary of the Australian Plate and Pacific Plates. New Zealand is part of Zealandia, a microcontinent nearly half the size of Australia that broke away from the Gondwanan supercontinent about 83 million years ago. New Zealand's early separation from other landmasses and subsequent evolution have created a unique fossil record and modern ecology.
Nelepsittacus is a genus of extinct New Zealand parrots that is closely related to the genus Nestor. It consists of four species, of which three have been named so far. The species are all known from the early Miocene Saint Bathans Fauna from the Lower Bannockburn Formation in Otago in New Zealand.
Proapteryx micromeros is an extinct kiwi known from the 16–19 million-year-old early Miocene sediments of the St Bathans Fauna of Otago, New Zealand.
The St Bathans fauna is found in the lower Bannockburn Formation of the Manuherikia Group of Central Otago, in the South Island of New Zealand. It comprises a suite of fossilised prehistoric animals from the late Early Miocene (Altonian) period, with an age range of 19–16 million years ago.
The Manuherikia Group is a fluvial-lacustrine sedimentary fill in the Central Otago area of New Zealand, at the site of the prehistoric Lake Manuherikia. The area consists of a valley and ridge topography, with a series of schist-greywacke mountains at roughly ninety degrees to each other. The Manuherika Group occurs in the current basins, and occasionally on the mountains themselves.
Lake Manuherikia was a prehistoric lake which once stretched over some 5,600 square kilometres (2,200 sq mi) in what is now inland Otago in New Zealand's South Island. It stretched from Bannockburn and the Nevis valley in the west to Naseby in the east, and from the Waitaki valley in the north to Ranfurly in the south, including much of the area now referred to as the Maniototo. The lake existed from around 19 to 16 million years ago during the Miocene epoch, at which point New Zealand was significantly warmer than the present.
The following lists events that happened during 2019 in New Zealand.
Foulden Maar is a fossil site near Middlemarch in Otago, New Zealand. The fossils were deposited in the small deep crater lake of a maar formed by a volcano in the Miocene era, around 23 million years ago. The crater lake existed for a period of around 130,000 years, and during this time it gradually filled up with diatomite, composed of annual layers of silica-shelled algae (diatoms). These layers of diatomite have preserved exceptional fossils of fish from the crater lake, and plants, spiders and insects from the sub-tropical forest that developed around the crater. The site is the only known maar of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, and is one of New Zealand's pre-eminent fossil sites. A 2018 proposal to mine Foulden Maar for livestock-food additive attracted significant public opposition. The mining company went into receivership in 2019, and in 2023, the Dunedin City Council reached agreement with the receivers to purchase the land, including the surrender of the mining permits.
Galaxias effusus is an extinct species of fish in the genus Galaxias, known only from 23-million-year-old fossils from New Zealand. It is named for its dramatically large dorsal, tail, and anal fins, which are much larger than those of any living New Zealand galaxiid. It is the earliest known member of the Southern Hemisphere family Galaxiiidae.
Heracles inexpectatus is a giant fossil parrot species from New Zealand, assigned to a monotypic genus Heracles, that lived during the early Miocene approximately 16 to 19 million years ago. The species was described from two tibiotarsus fossils discovered in 2008 at Saint Bathans, Otago, New Zealand. It is believed that the species stood up to 90 cm tall and weighed approximately 7 kg (15 lb). Initial analysis suggests that this parrot is from the order Psittaciformes and from the superfamily Strigopoidea, which consists of three confirmed primitive genera of parrots: Nestor, Strigops (kakapo) and the fossil Nelepsittacus. It may have been the ancestor of the kakapo.
Aaron Garth Hawkins is a New Zealand politician who served as the 58th mayor of Dunedin, New Zealand from 2019 to 2022. He was elected as Mayor on 12 October 2019 with 54.54% of the vote, after two prior terms as councillor. He is endorsed by the Green Party. He unsuccessfully stood for re-election as mayor in 2022.
Rachel Jane Brooking is a New Zealand Labour Party politician and Member of Parliament who is currently serving as the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries and Minister for Food Safety in the Sixth Labour Government. She first became an MP at the 2020 New Zealand general election. She is a lawyer by profession.
The Dunedin volcanic group is a recent reclassification due to common magma melt ancestry of the Dunedin Volcano, with the overlapping alkali basaltic monogenetic volcanic field which was known in earlier literature as the Waiareka-Deborah volcanic group or Waiareka volcanic field. Importantly excluded from the group are a group of volcanics of different composition and older age near Oamaru now termed the Waiareka-Deborah volcanic field. Confusingly the older Waiareka-Deborah volcanic field overlaps the Dunedin volcanic group geographically and high quality composition studies still need to be done to properly classify many volcanics near Oamaru. The Dunedin volcanic group covers over 7,800 km2 (3,000 sq mi) of Otago in the South Island of New Zealand.
(age 73)