Overview
Te Papa holds more than 100 specimens of fossil plants collected by WRB Oliver from the Kaikorai Valley near Dunedin. Many of the species were named by him and described in the article The Tertiary Flora of the Kaikorai Valley, Otago, New Zealand published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1936.
The identification of plant fossils can be difficult as there is often just a single leaf or even part of a leaf rather than leaves and flowers and fruit that botanists would usually examine.
The fossils from this series have all been imaged and can be seen below.