The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

On the way to Dunedin we took a detour to see fossil beds and interesting rock formations. Most of these are on private land and are inhabited by sheep and very noisy cows. The first site was the elephant rocks. It feels like it was a LOTR location but most of New Zealand felt like that, especially the south island.

It was actually used for filming the Narnia movies.

These are giant limestone formations jutting out of the landscape that have interesting erosion patterns formed by wind and rain.

The next spot had a protected whale fossil site. These fossils are very fragile and the rock around them much harder than back home so excavating them is very difficult as they fall apart quite easily.

Kerri enjoyed the formations as well.

You could also see some neat banding patterns in the limestone as each layer formed over time.

Here was a much larger group of whale fossils that can’t be further excavated due to their fragility.

These were giant boulders that have broken away from the main body and fallen. New Zealand has a fault running right through it and is no stranger to seismic activity.

Sometimes rocks form interesting structures while they crystalize. Here there are rectangular pillars all along the exposed surface.

Here is a really clear example of a coal deposit amongst the limestone where a lot of plant life was trapped to form this seam of coal.

After leaving Christchurch we made our way into the land of Lord of the Rings where strange creatures lurk (left) and lurked (right).

The skull is from a shark-toothed dolphin which lived about 25 million years ago.

This is the rest of its body.

All this area was underwater so there are lots of shells, whales and dolphins.

The rock is limestone which makes it a bit more difficult to excavate than the fossils in Drumheller.

The preservation is really good and you can see some cross sections of the bones.

They have found fossils of giant penguins in the area. Still not as big as Kerri though.

There were more Moa bones here although those are much younger from when the Maori had just come to the shores of New Zealand.

They also had cool rock concretions. These types of deposits form spheres that end up all over a couple of the beaches.

Here Kerri was hard at work excavating a fossilized shell. They have much different regulations on fossils here. It feels weird for them to just be given away.