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This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 178.
In 1840, the British naturalist Richard Owen caused an international scientific sensation when he deduced, from a single piece of moa leg bone, that a giant, flightless bird had once lived in New Zealand. Roger Fenton’s photograph of a moa skeleton, made at the British Museum between 1854 and 1858, is probably the first scientific photograph ever taken of a New Zealand subject. This Burton Brothers photograph was among the New Zealand-made images later in wide circulation. Moa skeletons were usually displayed among the clutter of a Victorian museum’s display galleries, where they competed with other skeletons and specimens. For this photograph at left, museum staff have found a less distracting background — but even so, we catch a glimpse of an office through the open door, and the moa’s long neck reaches upwards to graze the leafy wallpaper above. While this vertical posture made for an impressive museum display, scientists now think that moa carried their neck well forward and lower, like emu.