Giants in New Zealand

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Giants found on New Zealand islands, according to New Zealand Herald, 31 January 2005. A group of geologists and biologists who are studying the Chatham Islands, 850 km west of New Zealand have found a giant forget-me-not and the biggest sow thistle in the world. Apart from their size, the plants are similar to plants in New Zealand and Chile. They believe the gigantism is an adaptation to living on an island “where there was more sun and fewer animals around to eat them”. The scientists also found birds and insects that were different from those on the mainland, “but not as different as they might have expected”. The scientists concluded both the species therefore migrated to the islands more recently than previously thought.

Editorial Comment: In this case the plants seem to have grown bigger because they were in better growing conditions. The fossil record of plants has many giant plants, indicating growing conditions were better in the past. This fits with the book of Genesis that describes a good world, where plants were watered by a daily mist. After Noah's flood the environment degenerated and many plants died out or became much smaller. Those plants, like the Chatham Island plants that found themselves in good growing conditions, would have continued to grow relatively large compared with plants of the same kind that found themselves in less favourable conditions. We should note that the better conditions has not turned them into new species or different kinds of plants. These plants may have adapted, but they have not evolved, which is why they are not as different as the scientists were expecting. Adaptation is the built in, but limited, ability of living organism to modify their structure to best suit the environment they find themselves in. (Ref. giants, plants, adaptation)