The Sphenedon, a New Zealand Reptile, a Million Years Senior to Dinosaur The scientific world was startle ed, not long ago, by the report that traces of a living dinosaur had neon found in Patagonia, says a writer in Popular Science Sittings." Expeditions were organized to capture this very ancient form of life which natural history experts think died out three million years ago. But there is a creature living on a tiny islet off the New Zealand coast which is older. Sphenedon, to give it its scientific name, or Tuatera, as the Maoris called it, is at least a million years older than the dinosaur, And it exists to-day, three million years after the dinosaur perished from the earth!
Sphenedon. eight million years old by the most conservative estimate, is a species, genus, family and order all by itself. It is a reptile, but it is neither crocodile, lizard, snake, nor turtle. Loosely speaking, he is more of a lizard than anything else. He is really the grandfather of them all, and, by the same token, the ancestral form of the bird. It is, perhaps. seven and a half million years older than the first man and it looks just the same now as it did in the Permian period of the Palacozoic age, eight million years ago, Through ull these eight million years Sphenedon had gone right on in his rut; Old continents were destroyed and new continents arose from the ocean, and they in turn grew old and were destroyed, but Sphene-don went joggling along never changing his appearance or his habits or anything.
The Tuatera or Sphenedon is so important, scientifically, that the Government of New Zealand has taken—steps to protect it against extinction. It is an open question, however., whether the government has intervened in time, for as far back as 1882 the creatures were very rare. At one time, scientists believe, Sphene-don flourished all over New Zealand but it hag disappeared from the two maim islands, and of late years has only been found on a group of rock islands, none of them more than six acres in extent, in the Bay of Plenty on the cast side of the North Island. They gradually disappeared from all but one of the islands, and on that one. Karewa, only one man now knows where to find them. They have survived on Karewa because even the
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