Lying under farmland near Middlemarch in east Otago is an undisturbed fossil record telescoping 23 million years back in time. Foulden Maar, a former crater lake, stretches about a kilometre at its widest and, at its deepest, just over 180 metres.
Daphne Lee, honorary associate professor in the University of Otago’s geology department, has been chipping away at these rocks since she was a student in the 1970s. “It was just another site,” she recalls. “No one quite knew why it was there.”
Since 2003, however, Foulden Maar has revealed an archive of perfectly preserved fossils – algae, sponges, insects, fish, leaves, flowers. It has allowed scientists to piece together a rare picture of a subtropical rainforest ecosystem at the very beginning of the Miocene epoch (from about 23 million to 5.3 million years ago).
In a new book co-authored by Lee, German palaeontologist Uwe Kaulfuss and palaeobotanist John Conran, photographs provide an extraordinary insight into this record: the impossibly fragile wing of a termite, flowers with pollen grains still attached, the newly discovered, star-shaped , the vertebral column of an eel, detailed impressions of fern leaves carrying spores, a tiny ant with delicate forewings extended. There are fish with the remains
