Sometime early in 2001 my phone rang. It was Richard Williams, a cameraman I worked with a lot back then.
He said “I saw Joan Wiffen in the supermarket the other day and she is not looking too well. I think we ought to interview her for the record.”
“Who’s Joan Wiffen?” I asked .
“She’s the woman who discovered that dinosaurs once lived in New Zealand.”
“There were DINOSAURS in New Zealand??” I remember being gobsmacked. “Let’s do it”.
Joan was a retired housewife who decided to follow an old map to go gem stone hunting far up a remote river on the East Coast of the North Island of New Zealand when she discovered the first of many dinosaur bones.
I won’t spoil the story except to say we had no money but we decided to make the documentary that eventually screened on Discovery Channels around the world.
While some of the animation reveals how much more realistic computer animation has become in the last 22 years, I think the story is still strong and worth sharing. Not just for the challenge the discovery of large dinosaurs in New Zealand presents to the asteroid extinction theory - Joan remains a wonderful reminder to me of how life isn’t necessarily over when you reach retirement age. You can start something new and still make a contribution to knowledge, life, and what it means to be human.
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