1450: Re-Extinincted Swan

November 14, 2018

By AHNZ

Curator of vertebrates, Alan Tennyson, discusses new findings published today that New Zealand and the Chatham Islands had their own unique prehistoric swan. – Te Papa blog

“Another extinct bird: New Zealand’s prehistoric swan”

Seems like old news to me because I was already aware of extinct native swan, eagle, crow, and dogs. Check out any old New Zealand history book and it’s made quite clear.

But apparently, in 1998, it was decided (under funding from The State) that it was an ordinary swan and it has taken until 2017 to reverse the decision back again (under funding from The State.)

Swanning about for 20 Years

This may be very uncharitable but I feel like just giving The State Museum a slow sarcastic clap for that. They’ve simply gone around in a big circle for 20 years. Almost as if they’ve run out of animals to chide humans for killing off so they’ve resurrected an (“another”) old one to re-extinct us for. Squeeze that last drop of guilt out of the human for being human?

Funding for this detour and round-trip back to the start again was provided by The State via the now defunct Allan Wilson Centre. Wilson himself was a brilliant Kiwi scientist whose name has been (as usual) robbed from his grave by The State to cloth their own projects. Like this misadventure with the swan, the Centre achieved little since Labour 5.0 created it and National 5.0 pulled the plug. The last gasp to prove itself relevant of taxpayer funding was some kinda feel-good low-rent book version of what 23andme.com do without stolen money. And they do it so much better that the Africa to Aotearoa state project was embarrassingly obsolete before it was even published…which it never even will be!

What a big waste of time and of our money. The surest way to ruin science is to let government take it over.

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The article linked above estimates the extinction to c.1450

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