[[☃ image 2]]
In 2017, Earth's newest continent was declared. Long considered part of the Australian continent, [Zealandia](https://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2017/06/01/a-right-continental-fuss-zealandia-explained/) was declared a distinct landmass, one that separated from the Gondwanaland supercontinent [85 million years ago](https://teara.govt.nz/en/evolution-of-plants-and-animals/page-2).
When Zealandia broke away from Gondwanaland, several species of dinosaur and their aquatic cousins, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, came along for the ride. But that is just the beginning of the story; the land continued (and continues) to morph dramatically into the country we recognise as Aotearoa New Zealand today.
####Watch this video from The New Zealand History show for an introduction to both the very beginning of our story, and to some of the content we will consider more deeply throughout the rest of this course.
[[☃ video 1]]
###Transcript for the video above:
*Kia ora, I'm William Ray. Kia ora, I'm Leigh-Marama McLachlan and this is the Aotearoa History Show.*
*Over the next fourteen episodes we're going to run you through the story of these islands and their people. Lots of us go through life knowing bugger all about our past and if you don't know what's happened back in the day, you're going to have a really hard time understanding why things are the way they are now.*
*So that's where William and I come in. This show is going to reveal our history, warts and all. Some bits will make you super proud, others might make you feel pretty rubbish. Our history isn't just important, it's also super interesting.*
*We'll look at what the country was like before people arrived, the treaty those people signed, the wars they fought, and the people who led the way. Explorers. Innovators, prophets, warriors, diplomats. There's a lot of crazy stuff and we're gonna take you through everything. We don't have time for everything. We're gonna take you through most of the important stuff. That sounds pretty doable. But we have to meet you back here right after the titles.*
*“Whatungarongaro te tangata, toitū te whenua”, “people will perish but the land is permanent”. This is a whakataukī, a Māori saying, it symbolizes the importance of Papatūānuku, our land. Over the series we'll talk about the generations of people who have come and gone but first we need to tell the story of the land that sustained them. Māori legends have a lot to say about the origins of the land and sky this is the story of Ranginui and Papatūānuku - the sky father and earth mother how they were forced apart by their child Tāne Mahuta and how that separation gave space for new kinds of life.*
*Then there's the story of the origin of Aotearoa, how the demigod Māui hauled up a great fish and how his brothers hacked that fish to pieces carving out valleys and mountains and forming the shape of the land these stories of powerful primeval forces have parallels in our modern understanding of plate tectonics. Tectonic forces have been around for at least 4 billion years. ever since the earth first formed but the story of Aotearoa is relatively recent. I mean recent in geological terms, we're still going to have to go back a hundred million years!*
*OK, so a hundred million years ago the old supercontinent of Gondwana and Laurasia were beginning to be torn to pieces. You can almost make out the outline of modern-day continents like Africa and North and South America. But down south, Australia and Antarctica were still fused together. The land which will one day become New Zealand was sitting at the eastern edge of Gondwana but things were about to change. Superheated magma was rising up against the bottom of the crust. Stretching it, opening up deep fissures and fault lines.*
*Sometimes magma reached all the way to the surface, forming long chains of volcanoes. Eventually a huge section of land broke away from Gondwana and went sailing into the Pacific Ocean. It was a brand new continent – Zealandia, Te Riu-a-Māui. This continent was enormous about 5 million square kilometers. That's 18 times bigger than modern-day New Zealand. And as Zealandia took off into the Pacific, it brought a whole lot of plants and animals along for the ride.*
*Zealandia separated from Gondwana right at the peak of the age of dinosaurs, the middle Cretaceous period. But this wasn't just the age of dinosaurs there were lots of huge marine reptiles living in the seas around Zealandia. Just a quick bit of paleontological pedantry - ancient flying reptiles like pterosaurs, and swimming reptiles like plesiosaurs, are not technically dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are mostly land animals.*
*We've found quite a few fossils of marine reptiles in New Zealand like Māuisaurus and Taniwhasaurus. Taniwhasaurus,? Yeah I know, it's cool, eh! But actual dinosaur fossils are much rarer, like if you got all of New Zealand’s dinosaur fossils together in one place they'd probably fit inside a shoebox. Like, we've got a rib from an armored ankylosaur, we've got a couple of vertebra from several different big meat-eating theropods, we've got a vertebra of a giant long necked titanosaur, plus a few extra bones which we can't quite identify. Bro, are these your toys? Yeah, I get a new one every year for Christmas.*
*Based on such limited evidence, it's hard to say much about what New Zealand's dinosaurs were like but we can make a few educated guesses. Back in the age of dinosaurs the world was much warmer. Antarctica was covered in forests instead of ice, but Zealandia was much closer to the South Pole than New Zealand is today. So our dinosaurs must have survived months of darkness every year. In these conditions they might have evolved large eyes to see in the dark and thick coats of feathers to protect them from the cold. According to our educated guesses, our dinosaurs must have been pretty weird. Hopefully, we'll find some more complete skeletons in the future so we can confirm just how weird they were.*
*Okay, so me with the killjoy, just like in the rest of the world Zealandia’s dinosaurs were driven to extinction when an asteroid hit the earth around 66 million years ago in the Gulf of Mexico. This asteroid was about 10 kilometres across and it left a crater 200 kilometers wide. Impact debris rained down all over the world and dust blocked out the Sun for weeks. 80% of life on Earth died out including all the non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and giant marine reptiles.*
*After the extinction of the dinosaurs, mammals quickly evolved to fill the niches they left behind. Mammals eventually became huge plant eaters, and apex predators - or at least that's what happened everywhere else in the world. What happened in Zealandia was very different. There were almost certainly mammals scurrying around in Zealandia when it separated from Gondwana. Mammals lived alongside dinosaurs for millions of years all over the world but by the time Māori arrived here about seven hundred years ago, New Zealand's mammals had vanished.*
*Today our only native mammals are three species of bat which seemed to have flown here relatively recently from Australia. So what happened to the rest of our mammals? One theory suggests that at some point Zealandia slipped completely beneath the sea, so all our mammals drowned. But nowadays most scientists think there was always some land above the surface which should have been enough to keep our mammals afloat. But still something wiped them out and we just have no idea what it was. It's one of the biggest mysteries of prehistoric New Zealand.*
*Thanks to the lack of mammals, Aotearoa became dominated by birds. Most of which colonized New Zealand after flying here or after being blown across the ocean from other places. Once they arrived in New Zealand, these birds were safe from mammal predators so many species lost the ability to fly and took on radically different body shapes. The most radical change was the moa. The ancestors of the moa originally flew to New Zealand from Antarctica but over millions of years they completely lost their wings and grew much, much bigger.*
*The largest moa could stand more than 3 metres tall and weighed more than 200 kilos. Some birds kept their ability to fly, mostly these were smaller birds like the tūi and piwakawaka but there was one giant the pouākai or haast’s eagle, the largest bird of prey that's ever existed. The pouākai was the only animal big enough to take on a moa. They would dive out of the sky and hit with the force of a concrete block thrown from an eight story building – a concrete block with claws as big as a tiger.*
*Meanwhile, the land was still changing. At first Zealandia got stretched out and then it sank. Only a scattering of small islands were left above the surface. Then it was shoved up against the neighboring Australia plate and a bit of crust right on the boundary was pushed upwards. The land we call Aotearoa New Zealand rose from the sea. It's kind of like the story of Māui and his great fish.*
*There were also huge changes in the climate. Around 2.6 million years ago, the whole world fell into a series of ice ages. Glaciers grew over much of the central South Island, carving out huge valleys through the Southern Alps. Before the ice ages, Aotearoa was covered in the kinds of tropical plants you can see today in the forests of northern Queensland or Papua New Guinea but by the end of the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago, those plants had been replaced by rimu, totara, kauri, lots of ferns. The kind of plants we see in the bush today.*
*The huge glaciers in the South Island melted, leaving behind gigantic lakes like Wanaka, Tekapo, and Te Anau. But here's a funny thing about the ice ages; during the last ice age sea levels were a hundred and twenty-five meters lower than they are today. All the major islands of New Zealand were locked together in one big landmass. But global average surface temperatures were only about five degrees colder than today. That means every degree of warming over the last eighteen thousand years is translated to roughly twenty-five meters of sea level rise. Small changes in global temperature can translate to very big changes in the global climate and that's why scientists are really, really worried about global warming today.*
*OK, so that's the serious stuff, now let's talk about volcanoes. Sitting at the edge of a colliding plate boundary means that magma often finds weak points to bubble up through the crust under New Zealand. In over the last two million years, one of those weak points has set directly beneath the central North Island, the site of some of the world's most violent volcanic eruptions. The biggest was the oruanui eruption. About 25,000 years ago, it blanketed the entire North Island in ash and molten rock leaving behind the gigantic caldera which we now call Lake Taupō.*
*The Taupō super volcano has erupted many times but the last explosion happened in 232 AD, about the time the Roman Empire was at its height. This was much smaller than the oruanui event, but it's still the most violent volcanic eruption the world's seen in 5000 years. It covered most of the central North Island in a thick layer of ash and pumice - even a thousand kilometres away on the Chatham Islands, the ash fell half a metre deep.*
*Lake Taupō is still an active volcano and it will erupt again in the future, but you don't need to worry too much though because it's constantly monitored by scientists and we'd get a warning if it was winding up for another big explosion. The final major change in New Zealand's landscape happened after 1290, and if you dig down into the earth in many parts of Aotearoa you'll come across a thin layer of ash.*
*But this ash didn't come from a volcano, it came from a series of huge fires which ripped through New Zealand's forests. These fires were lit by human beings; the first humans ever to reach Aotearoa. Who were they? Where did they come from? That's a story for our next episode.*
*No reira tēnā koutou katoa, thank you so much for watching our very first episode of the Aotearoa History Show. We've got a bunch more coming - we're going all the way from a hundred million years ago up to pretty much the modern day. So make sure you subscribe at the bottom, give us a like, tell your friends about us, hit that little bell icon and then you'll get notified about all of our episodes as they come out.*
*Thanks for joining us on the Aotearoa History Show produced by RNZ and made possible by the RNZ New Zealand on Air Digital Innovation Fund.*