[Taxacom] Aging New Zealand's species

[John Grehan]

Fortunately not all journals subscribe to totalitarian control of science
and so despite calls for such  by some prominent NZ scientists, the popular
Journal "The Listener" recently allowed reference to alternative viewpoints
by publishing a 'letter to the editor' Transcript below. I can provide pdf
of the original article and letter for anyone so interested.

John Grehan

The Listener December 22 2018 – January 4 2019

Letters, p. 6

Aging New Zealand’s species

Trevor Worthy and his colleagues are to be commended for their efforts to
reveal the existence of now extinct elements of New Zealand’s animal life.
“Exotic Paradise”, September 29). However, I would assert that he is wrong
in his belief that “a heck of a lot’ of New Zealand’s species aren’t very
old. There is no empirical evidence for this and molecular clocks often
cited as support are only minimum estimates. Instead, as demonstrated in
unprecedented detail and broad  scope in Michael Head’s “Biogeography and
Evolution in New Zealand” (2018, CRC Press), there is a wealth of
biogeographic and tectonic evidence that most of New Zealand’s endemic
biota are fragments of eastern Gondwana before the rifting of Zealandia.
This evidence was further supported in a recent study in Zootaxa (2018:
4415) demonstrating that New Zealand’s ghost moths also follow similar
Gondwana patterns. While many  researchers may have assumed that most of
the original biota was ‘drowned’ in the Oligocene, or that the surviving
fauna lacked major predator groups, this was never the case for pioneering
researchers such as Robin Craw and Michael Heads who characterized the
tectonic evolution of New Zealand’s biota long before the new fossil
evidence. They demonstrated that New Zealand’s biological and geological
origins have a shared history, and I contend that it is this finding to be
the most significant educational message for the students of tomorrow.

John Grehan