Fiji’s Extinct Megafauna

As with most islands in the Pacific, the distance between neighboring land masses can be huge, and this has a filtering effect on colonizing species. Animals that can fly (birds, bats, and insects) or survive rafting across seas (reptiles and rodents) dominate island fauna, while amphibians and freshwater fish are very rare colonists.  Recently, advances in pale zoology (the scientific study of extinct animals) have led to the discovery that Fiji was once home to a large variety of animals and birds, some considerably larger than their relatives that survive today, which became extinct very soon after the human settlement of the islands. This appears to have been the sad fate of much of Fiji’s original fauna, possibly within only 50 years of initial human occupation, some 3,000 years ago.

Most of the discoveries of fossil material in Fiji were made by the New Zealand paleontologist Trevor Worthy and the staff of the Fiji Museum in a number of limestone caves. Two are near Volivoli, just north of the celebrated sand dunes of Sigatoka, Nadroga, in the southwest of the main island of Viti Levu. One of these is named Qaranivokai, which means ‘cave of the iguana’. Other caves in which copious material has been found are at Wailotua in the Wainibuku valley, inland northern Viti Levu, and at Wainibuku, near Suva in southeast Viti Levu. These caves appear to have formed natural pitfalls so that animals fell into them through holes or cracks and remained entombed there until they died. Their bones then became embedded and preserved in layers of sediment…