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BlueLake,StBathansthemostbiodiverseMiocenefossilplantlocalityMikePole

MikePole

March 13, 2016 / comment 0 / Edit

BlueLake,StBathansthemostbiodiverseMiocenefossilplant
locality
The biodiversity of Blue Lake, at St Bathans, New Zealand, is precisely zero. It is an arti cial lake
partly lling a hole blasted out in the search for gold in the 19th century. The holeis directly in front
of one of St Bathans and New Zealands gems the Vulcan Hotel. If you ran out the front door and
forgot to stop at the cliff marking the edge of the old workings you would land inone of the most
biodiverse fossilplant sites anywhere on the planet.

Blue Lake, St Bathans, New Zealand

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The gold miners were sluicing quartz-rich gravel and sands. But in among those are thinner beds and
lenses of mud. These are often full of plant fossils of Miocene age say around 17-18 million years.
Sometimes these are amazingly-preserved whole leaves the featured image and one below show
fossil leaves that have been oated out of the mudstone and then set in glycerine jelly between
sheets of plastic. But often the fossils are just a hash of leaf fragments. This looks like a handful of
compost at rst, but its this hash, plus the extremely good preservation of that hash that can make
just a single handful of mud rich with fossils.
On the slope marking the edge of the Blue Lake digging and in front of the Vulcan Hotel there used to
be a pine tree. It was my marker to locate a lens of mud remarkable by itself for its fossil plant
content. In a few handfuls of mud from that lens were seven genera of conifers and at least 48
owering plants. The conifers included some of our familiar New Zealand trees like matai
(Prumnopitys) and rimu (Dacrydium). But there were also surprises. There wasAcmopyle unique as
ahairy-leaved conifer, and only growing in Fiji and New Caledonia now. Also Retrophyllum, a conifer
with a distinctive paired arrangement of leaves along its shoot, but now found only in New Caledonia,
Melanesia and South America.

Miocene leaf fossil from Blue Lake, St

Bathans, New Zealand

And that little lens was just the start of it. Blue Lake has many such lenses, and over the hill is a sisterlake one of the local names being Grey Lake. It has a similar kind of geology. The sands and mud
exposed in these lakes were deposited in an ancient river owing along what geologist BarryDouglas
(1986) has called the St Bathans PaleoValley. It came from uplands in the west, to the coast
somewhere to the east. Inboth Blue and Grey Lake muds Ive now recorded a total of13 conifers,
144 owering-plant typesand a further two cycad-likeones. To put this biodiversity in context,As a
comparison, today there are around 215 species of tree in the entire New Zealand region (including
the subtropical Kermadec Island; McGlone et al., 2010) and nine genera of conifers. So in an area of
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just a few hectares there are more fossil conifer types than in all of New Zealand today. This is one
of the most biodiverse, and perhaps the most, Miocene plant fossil localities anywhere.
What caused this high biodiversity? It was certainly warmer the climate was warm temperate or
even subtropical. Average temperatures would have been at least 6-7 degrees warmer than today.
But perhaps more importantly, the cooler temperatures would have been much warmer. The harsh
frosts and snow that St Bathans gets now, would have been entirely unknown. The kinds of rainforest
plant fossils found at Blue Lake prove that rainfall too, would have been higher and more consistent,
quite unlike the low and drought-ridden climate that the area has now. On top of that, Douglas
considered that the ancient river was braided. This is a type of river that has many channels, and
switches between them from time to time. This process keeps vegetation in various stages of
succession, allowing many species a chance to nd their niche.

Vulcan Hotel, St Bathans, New Zealand in the

snow. There would have been no snow, or even
frosts, during the Miocene when biodiverse
rainforest grew here.

The Miocene plant fossils of Blue and Grey Lakes are a treasure -trove and much remains yet to be
understood. Many of the fragmentary plant fossils are still unidenti ed. They are clearly not plants
living in New Zealand today but where will similar plants turn-up? New Caledonia? Patagonia?
Madagascar? And just what were the plant communities that lived in the St Bathans Paleovalley?
How many new fossils wait to be found?
And that rst lens of mud? The one beside the pine tree? Pine trees are an introduced, often invasive
conifer in New Zealand. Their spread across parts of New Zealand is causing problems (they shade
out smaller natives, acidify the soil and are a re hazard) and so the Department of Conservation is
doing their best to control the pines. That pine, one of the few trees in an otherwise naturally
vegetation-free spot, was removed, and along with it, much of that biodiverse fossil lens. In fact, with
the pine tree gone and the disturbance that created, Ive had trouble re-locating it.
Something very ironic there!
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References
Links will take you to a site to download pdfs of the papers.
Douglas, B. J. 1986. Lignite resources of Central Otago. New Zealand Energy Research and
Development Committee Publication P104: Volume one, Volume 2.
Pocknall, D.T., 1982. Pollen and spores from Blue Lake, St Bathans (H41) and Harliwichs Lignite Pit,
Roxburgh (G43), Central Otago, New Zealand. Palynology Section, NZGS, Lower Hutt.
Pole, M.S., 1992. Early Miocene ora of the Manuherikia Group, New Zealand. 2. Conifers. Journal of
the Royal Society of New Zealand 22, 287-302.
Pole, M.S., 1997. Miocene conifers from the Manuherikia Group, New Zealand. Journal of the Royal
Society of New Zealand 27, 355-370.
McGlone, M. S., S. J. Richardson, et al. 2010. Comparative biogeography of New Zealand trees:
species richness, height, leaf traits and range sizes. New Zealand Journal of Ecology 34: 1-15.
Pole, M., 2007. Conifer and cycad distribution in the Miocene of southernNew Zealand. Australian
Journal of Botany 55, 143-164.
Pole, M., 2008. Dispersed leaf cuticle from the Early Miocene of southern New Zealand.
Palaeontologia Electronica 11 (3) 15A:, 1-117.
Pole, M., 2014. The Miocene climate in New Zealand: Estimates from paleobotanical data.
Palaeontologia Electronica 17, 1-79, palaeo-electronica.org/content/2014/2780-miocene-climateof-new-zealand.

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Tagged: Central Otago, climate, forests, fossils, New Zealand, New Zealand paleobotany, New Zealand plant fossils

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