Joan Wiffen

Joan Wiffen (née Pederson; 4 February 1922 – 30 June 2009) was a self-taught New Zealand paleontologist known for discovering the first dinosaur fossils in New Zealand.

Early life Wiffen was born in 1922 and was brought up in Havelock North and the King Country. She only had a very short secondary school education as her father believed that higher education was wasted on girls, resulting in her education opportunities being limited during her youth. At the age of 16, Wiffen joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force during World War II where she served for six years.

In 1975 Wiffen discovered the first dinosaur fossils in New Zealand in the Mangahouanga Valley in Northern Hawkes Bay. Her first discovery was the tail bone of a theropod dinosaur. Her later finds included bones from a hypsilophodont, a pterosaur, an ankylosaur, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. The fossils Wiffen found are primarily held in a GNS Science collection.

Wiffen was self-taught in extracting the bones from the rock, which involved much trial and error. As she lacked formal training and qualifications, she faced scepticism about the validity of her findings. She was therefore unable to present her paper on her dinosaur bone finding at the 1980 Gondwana Conference at Victoria University, which instead had to be presented by another recognised palaeontologist, Dr Ralph Molnar. In the 1995 New Year Honours, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to science. In 2004, she won the Morris Skinner Award from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Personal life In 1953 she married Pont Wiffen and they had two children. She dedicated the next two decades of her life to her family and maintaining their farm in Hawke's Bay farm. Joan Wiffen died at the age of 87 on 30 June 2009 in Hastings Hospital.