New Zealand is the only country in the world that has an essentially complete, open-access database of its known fossil record.
It’s existed for almost 80 years, beginning in 1946 as a filing cabinet stuffed with paper forms at the New Zealand Geological Survey. The project was the initiative of Harold Wellman—the pioneering geologist who famously discovered New Zealand’s 370-mile-long Alpine Fault—and a few others working on the first geological mapping of the country.
“They wanted ready access to all this information in a standardized, accessible way,” said James Crampton, a paleontologist at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington. “It was a brilliant idea.”
The forms assigned a map reference and a serial number to locations, and recorded the fossils seen or collected there, as well as notes on stratigraphy and the rocks’ grain size, weathering, and color.
Because it began so early in New Zealand’s scientific history, pulling the few existing records into the database “was doable in a way that wasn’t doable anywhere else in the world,” Crampton said.
Roughly similar databases do exist in other countries, and some, like the global Paleobiology Database, contain more records. But none has such density of coverage of an entire region, said GNS Science’s Chris Clowes, the current custodian of the Fossil Record Electronic Database—dubbed FRED.
The fossil record is an extremely partial chronicle of life on Earth, he’s careful to point out. But New Zealand has an extremely rich trove of fossils, especially from the Late Cretaceous and later periods, and the database represents “a very complete coverage of the incomplete record that we have. Of the fossils we have, a huge proportion of them have been captured,” Clowes said.
Over the decades, the records moved from physical to digital and the maps were recalibrated from imperial to metric. FRED now contains more than 100,000 location entries, mainly from New Zealand, but also from the southeastern Pacific islands and the Ross Sea region of Antarctica.
The database is considered “an icon of New Zealand geological literature,” according to an article published in 2020 by Clowes and others.
Open to All
Anyone can sign up to access FRED’s online portal and make an entry. Four curators from different universities review the entries and fix obvious errors. “We have all sorts of people contributing data, from rank amateurs to professional paleontologists,” Clowes said.
In the years since its inception, the database and the spirit of trust and collaboration it embodies have become an important part of New Zealand’s geological and paleontological culture—and the envy of international colleagues, said Daphne Lee, a paleontologist at the University of Otago who has been using the database for many decades.
The file is a way of “passing on information from one scientific generation to the next.”
It’s long been an expectation—even a requirement—that any newly discovered New Zealand fossil site will be entered into the file, she said. “For scientific papers to pass peer review or students’ theses to be accepted, they must have the FRED serial number included.”
She admitted that scientists aren’t always so prompt at submitting a record for every single fossil they find. But overall, the file is a way of “passing on information from one scientific generation to the next,” she said. “You might find a place you thought was new, but you’ll find, my goodness, in 1957 someone already found a fossil there, and you didn’t know about it.” Much more detailed data are preserved than tend to make it into scientific papers, she added, meaning knowledge amassed by paleontologists over their lifetimes doesn’t die with them.
And now, other scientists around the world can analyze those decades of data to make new discoveries. In 2018, for instance, researchers based in the United States delved into FRED’s fossil records to calculate mollusk extinction rates, and found that New Zealand (alongside the Caribbean) is a present-day extinction hot spot for bivalves.
Some scientists fear that FRED’s heyday may be behind us. New Zealand’s science funding has been slashed, and job losses are rife in both universities and government-funded institutions.
“It’s a remarkable data set, and it’s served New Zealand incredibly well.”
When it comes to paleontology, “we’re struggling to keep critical mass in several of our universities, and we’ve lost it entirely in a couple,” said Clowes. “I think that probably we’re going to enter a phase where there’s not an awful lot of new data being entered [into the database]. I’m hoping that at some point, the pendulum will swing back, and we’ll start doing more fundamental research again.”
Crampton said he hopes FRED will be around for at least another 80 years. “It’s a remarkable data set, and it’s served New Zealand incredibly well,” he said. “It allows us to interrogate what we know of New Zealand’s fossil history in a way that no one else can.”
—Kate Evans (@kate_g_evans), Science Writer
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