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Geopark goes Victorian

Updated: Jul 25, 2019

Cheers to everyone who stopped by our stall at Network Waitaki Victorian Fete Day in Oamaru's Victorian Precinct on Sunday!

Man looking through Microscope to see Diatoms

The Network Waitaki Victorian Fete is held every year in the Victorian Precinct and is a day jammed packed with entertainment - Victorian costumes, jugglers, street performers, magicians and stilt walkers are around every corner. One of the highlights is the Annual Stone Sawing Championships where teams of two race to saw through giant blocks of Oamaru Limestone.


We decked out the Waitaki Whitestone Geopark stall with a Victorian Theme and played host to a whole assortment of costumed folk. Many thanks also to Professor Ewan Fordyce who was on call with all the facts on our ancient dolphins (and everything else!) and Marcus Richards for sharing his knowledge on our prehistoric penguins.


Our resident geologist Sophie Briggs (looking every bit the Victorian schoolmarm) helped junior palaeontologists unearth and identify fossils in our fossil dig. We had a microscope set up with slides of Oamaru Diatomite so we could look at diatoms - once tiny unicellular organisms - now tiny beautiful fossils made of glass! Plus there was a cast of fossil bones in limestone, belonging to the giant penguin 'Kairuku', whose name loosely translates to 'diver who returns with food'. These penguins once stood about 1.3 metres tall!



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