A marvellous menagerie of zoological oddities

It’s said that at the end of the world there be dragons. While the dragons seemed to have moved on, New Zealand remains populated by plenty of extremely curious critters.

The unique and, frankly, bizarre evolution of our native animals is attributed to this land’s 80 million-year separation from the Gondwana continent. With no land-based mammals to hassle them, our birds and insects adapted and evolved in a wildly different fashion from their cousins.

Takahe 

One of our endemic flightless birds, the takahe is a survivor. They look a little like a pukeko but are much bigger, weighing up to 3kgs and are more colourful with vibrant red beaks and feather colouring similar to that of a peacock. Takahe are monogamous and mate for life. The birds were long thought to be extinct until wonderfully, Geoffrey Orbell, a doctor from Invercargill, rediscovered them in Fiordland’s remote Murchison Mountains. Weirdly, no one is sure why the birds were found in such a harsh alpine area. While their numbers are clawing back from the brink, they still remain critically endangered.

Tuatara 

Nicknamed living fossils, these fellas were scurrying about while dinosaurs stomped the earth. They occupy a curious evolutionary space, offering direct links not just between the obvious lizards and snakes, but also with birds, crocodiles and fish. They are chock-full of weird and wonderful features such as the third eye on the top of their head, their thoroughly unique dual rows of upper
teeth, their hourglass shaped vertebrae, which is a trait of fish and amphibians, and the fact they can hear but don’t have ears. Also, male tuatara don’t have a penis, but they’ve been around for over 200 million years so they must be doing something right.

Powelliphanta snail

It sounds like something straight out of a horror movie: New Zealand is home to a carnivorous snail. Yes, that’s right, a giant, meat eating snail. Hold on,“giant”, you say? Well, the thing can grow to the size of a man’s fist so, yes, giant is an apt description. Before you panic there are two wonderful things you should know: they live in the deepest depths of the forest and not in your lovely landscaped garden and secondly, they prefer to suck up worms and slugs rather than chow down on human. You should be safe doing your weeding this weekend...

Short-tailed bat

The weird thing about the shorttailed bat is that they’re not big on flying. Instead, they emerge at night to forage on the forest floor. They scramble around, pulling themselves forward with their folded front wings which are unique in having small talons. Wonderfully, this makes them one of the most important pollinators of the threatened woodrose plant.

The giraffe weevil

Have you ever seen anything as wonderfully ridiculous as this? It clocks in at a majestic nine centimetres, easily making it the longest native insect. Mostly snout, its proboscis accounts for half its astonishing length. You can easily spot the difference between sexes as the male’s antenna sit at the end, while females have theirs located half way down. Weirdly, the giraffe weevil isn’t a weevil at all, but instead belongs to the Brentidae family of beetles.