Last weekend I returned to our fossil whale locality in Palliser Bay with John Simes, the paleontology collections manager at GNS Science. This is where I had found three large jaw bone fragments of a fossil baleen whale last November. We decided to have a good look through some of the loose debris in the […]
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Last week I visited Palliser Bay in the Wairarapa. Along the coastline there are many exposures of mudstone from the Hurupi Formation, about 11 to 8 million years old. These mudstones contain abundant marine shell fossils, but are also known for occasional whale bones. After some time searching, as luck would have it, I found
Palliser Bay is an isolated sweep of coastline about 2 hours drive from Wellington. It is separated from New Zealand’s busy capital city by the Rimutaka Range. Yesterday I visited the area with a group of Lower Hutt school children as part of their Year Seven geology camp. Fully armed with the “Kiwi Fossils Hunter’s