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Introduced Predators and Avifaunal Extinction in New Zealand

  • Chapter
Extinctions in Near Time

Part of the book series: Advances in Vertebrate Paleobiology ((AIVP,volume 2))

Abstract

At 270,000 km2, New Zealand is one-thirtieth the area of Australia, one-third that of Madagascar, twice that of Cuba, and comparable in area to the British Isles, to the Philippines, and within the United States to the State of Colorado. Isolated in the southwestern Pacific, 1900 km east of Australia, New Zealand was the last major habitable landmass to be peopled, in this instance by Polynesians. Unlike the British Isles and the Philippines, which are partly on and partly off the continental shelf, New Zealand is so remote that despite zoogeographic and geotectonic evidence of a considerable antiquity, it lacked nonvolant land mammals when humans and their commensals colonized 700 years ago.

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  1. Palaecol Research, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Richard N. Holdaway

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  1. Department of Mammalogy, American Museum of Natural History, 10024, New York, New York, USA

    Ross D. E. MacPhee

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Holdaway, R.N. (1999). Introduced Predators and Avifaunal Extinction in New Zealand. In: MacPhee, R.D.E. (eds) Extinctions in Near Time. Advances in Vertebrate Paleobiology, vol 2. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5202-1_9

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