“These were priceless treasures from the past – and, suddenly, I was hooked. I knew what I wanted – to collect fossils.” - Joan Wiffen
Beginning of her life
Joan Wiffen was born in 1922 in Auckland, New Zealand and was raised in New Zealand. She left school at 12 insofar as her father didn't consider women’s education as necessary. At 20, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, a feminine force in the Royal Air Force during WWII.
Self-taught woman
After a few years of marriage, Joan’s husband, Pont, enrolled in a geology course. Due to sickness, Pont couldn’t attend the classes; Joan replaced him. She wasn’t a trained scientist but an amateur. Thanks to those courses, but also her attentive observation and logic, she learned to locate fossils, to extract them, to identify them… Moreover, due to her “ignorance” of the scientific field, she wasn’t familiar with the belief of the time, that New Zealand was empty of dinosaurs due to the long isolation of the country. This led her to explore New Zeland anyways. Her nickname was “the dinosaur lady” even though she preferred “the dinosaur woman”.
Her discoveries
Following an old geological map indicating reptile’s bones in the valley of Te Hoe, she discovered the tail bone of a theropod dinosaur in the Maungahouanga valley. In the same fashion, later she spoted more than half a dozen of other dinosaurs, including an armored ankylosaurus, a hypsilophodon, as well as a flying pterosaur reptile and marine reptiles. In 1988, Joan Wiffen published an article on the first pterosaur fossil (see the photo opposite) found in New Zealand. She received an honorary doctorate from Massey University in 1994. In June 2009, Wiffen died at the age of 87.
Most of the fossil discoveries are preserved in GNS Science, a governmental research organism in NZ. Furthermore, her work and herself are also preserved through her numerous scientific publications on Late Cretaceous biota, including bony fishes, sea turtles, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, dinosaurs, and pterosaurs. These articles are the pillars of paleontology and inspire various paleontologists. Especially Dr Ralph E. Monar, paleontologist and co-author of Joan Wiffen’s publications who declared:
“Joan showed that the interested, logical and critical mind is the single most important factor in success”.
Written by Mathilde J. and edited Tiffanie C.
Sources
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