Crown Park — Des Hunt

Jack Stewart hates his new life in Taupo. Everyone at school picks on him; his only friend is a stray cat called Chainsaw; and his parents are always away working.

Then he meets Fluoro, Taupo's most visible street person. Fluoro's home is an old explosion crater in Crown Park where steam and poisonous gases still hiss and ooze from the ground. Jack soon finds that Fluoro has chosen this place not just for the heat coming from deep inside the earth, but because it provides a link to the last eruption of Lake Taupo, two thousand years before.

With the man's help, Jack learns how to take his mind back to when moa and other ancient animals faced the world's greatest eruption since history began. Along with a group of creatures called the Luce Crew, they embark on a rescue mission that threatens not only these animals of the past, but humans in the present.

Linking the present with the past, fiction with fact, Des Hunt allows us to witness one of the Earth's greatest eruptions from the safety of our homes. We also meet creatures that are no longer with us: Dinornis novaezeelandiae, the North Island giant moa, was one of the world's largest birds but lasted little more than a hundred years after man arrived in Aotearoa/New Zealand. There are also birds that pack hunt like dogs; geese, so big that flight is impossible; and a tiny bat whose ancestors were amongst the first of the mammals.