Joan Wiffen

The fossil she found. Died 30 June 2009 (aged 87) hastings,NZ. Born Joan Pederson 4 February 1922.





Career. In 1975 Wiffen discovered the first dinosaur


fossils in New Zealand in the


Maungahounga Valley in Northern


Hawkes Bay. Her first discovery was


the tail bone of a theropod dinosaur.


Her later finds included bones from a


hypsilophodon, a pterosaur, an ankylosaur,


mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. She has a brother named Joseph.Joan Wiffen was a self-taught


palaeontologische greatly advanced


knowledge of fossil reptiles in New Zealand.


Wiffen, who described herself as ‘a rank amateur,


a Hawkes Bay housewife in fact, with no scientific


training,


just a great deal of curiosity’, made some of New Zealand’s


most important scientific breakthroughs.


Despite a lack of formal education or specialised equipment, Joan’s excavations of fossil remains in a remote Hawke’s


Bay valley produced the first evidence


that dinosaurs had once lived on the New Zealand landmass.