Kawekaweau killed by an Urewera chief in the Waimana Valley

In 1870 the Urewera was a district at war. William Gilbert Mair was Resident Magistrate at Ōpōtiki, a post he held from 1866 to 1871, during the campaigns against Te Kooti. He commanded about 180 Māori auxiliaries attached to St John's column as it went up the Whakatāne Valley into the Urewera. He spoke te reo Māori fluently. He was in the district, and people talked to him.

Māori knowledge told of a large forest lizard. The kawekaweau. Mair spelled it kaweau, and the variant koeau is also recorded. Traditions placed it at widespread localities in the northern half of the North Island, particularly Northland.

Waimana Valley. Northern Te Urewera. An Urewera chief, whose name was never recorded, found a lizard hiding under the loose bark of a dead rātā tree. He killed it. Later he described the animal to Mair as being "about two feet long and as thick as a man's wrist; colour brown, striped longitudinally with dull red."

That is the whole account. Nothing on how it moved. Nothing on its eyes, its sound or its smell. No companions are mentioned, and no record says the body was kept. One witness. One encounter. One short paragraph.

Mair placed the story in a brief paper, "Notes on Rurima Rocks", printed in Transactions of the New Zealand Institute volume 5 and published in 1873. It has since been called the only documented report of anyone ever seeing a kawekaweau alive. No skin survives. No drawing. No photograph.

More than a century passed. Then, in the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle de Marseille, a giant stuffed gecko surfaced with no label. Alain Delcourt is credited with finding it, in 1979 by some accounts and 1986 by others. It had been gutted, dried and mounted, and had likely been in the collections since at least 1870, perhaps since the 1830s. Total length at least 60 cm. Yellowish brown, with dark reddish brown stripes along the body.

In 1986 Bauer and Russell described it as Hoplodactylus delcourti, a New Zealand gecko, and suggested it was the lost kawekaweau. The fit to the chief's words was very close. A model of the animal is now displayed at the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle de Lille.

Doubts followed. Extensive fossil and subfossil material had failed to show the species in New Zealand. In 2023 an archival DNA study by Heinicke and colleagues placed the specimen among the geckos of New Caledonia, and a new genus was created for it. It became Gigarcanum delcourti. Even so, the authors wrote that no extant or extinct reptile known from New Zealand matches the body size and colour of the kawekaweau more closely. Where the Marseille animal came from remains unresolved.

No one has accused the chief, Mair or the specimen of a hoax. The usual reading is that the gecko was a New Caledonian animal collected around the 1830s that lost its label.

The kawekaweau lost the only physical evidence ever tied to it. The chief's account did not change. A brown lizard with dull red stripes, killed under rātā bark in 1870, still stands as it was told. The Marseille specimen holds the Guinness World Records entry for largest gecko ever, Russell's work inspired a novel by French author Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut, and the story lives on in cryptozoology writing such as Richard Muirhead's 2009 blog post for the Centre for Fortean Zoology.