Overview
The fossil plants dated to the Jurassic period have been collected from various places in New Zealand, mostly from Southland. Some of these were collected by James Hector, the first director of the Colonial Museum and the Geological Survey and John Buchanan who worked with him.
The fossils from Mataura Falls and Curio Bay are from the mid-Jurassic Temaikan period 176-164 million years ago and the collections from the Waikato Heads are late-Jurassic (Puaroan 150-145 Mya). The Jurassic period spanned 56 million years!
No flowering plants had evolved yet, there were mostly ferns and seed ferns (eg extinct Gondwana seed fern group Pentoxylales), also some conifers and horsetails.
The fossils from this series have all been imaged and can be seen below.