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© 2020 The Royal Society of New Zealand. The New Zealand Fossil Record File, an essentially complete compilation of New Zealand’s known fossil record, with additional records from parts of Antarctica, SW Pacific, and elsewhere, is, to the best of our knowledge, unique. It has developed collaboratively, with contributions from university, government, industry, and avocational paleontologists and geologists. The distinctive Fossil Record Number has become an icon of New Zealand geological literature since inception of the original paper-based archive in the 1940s. Subsequently, the file has been digitised and currently holds >100,000 locality records and >1,000,000 individual taxonomic identifications spanning numerous plant and animal phyla. These numbers are continually growing. The database contains contextual information on geographic location, collection, stratigraphy and lithology of the fossil localities as well as taxonomic analyses that retain original identifications yet accommodate re-assignments. The data have been widely applied, initially for mapping, establishing age, depositional environment, etc., and more recently including in quantitative biostratigraphy, assessing completeness of the fossil record, understanding biodiversity history, extinction risk assessments, and climate analysis. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of the history of the Fossil Record File, indicate the general nature of the data it contains, and showcase a number of innovative applications of this most valuable resource.

The Late Cretaceous Rakopi Formation (Pakawau Group) represents one of the most important petroleum source rock units and a potential reservoir unit in the highly prospective Taranaki Basin. This paper presents a predominantly outcrop‐based study of the sedimentology, petrography, stratigraphy, and depositional environment of the Rakopi Formation in the Paturau River and Pakawau areas of northwest Nelson, southern Taranaki Basin, together with some preliminary insights into the stratigraphie architecture of the Pakawau Group on a more basin‐wide scale. The Rakopi Formation is interpreted here as a terrestrial deposit, representing sedimentation in fluvial channels and their associated overbank and levee environments. However, the presence of dinoflagellates, glauconite, and elevated coal seam sulfur contents is evidence for periodic marine influence during deposition. This could be explained by a low‐gradient coastal plain paleogeography, crossed by a series of rivers and their associated floodpl...

The Pongaroa‐Akitio area, Northern Wairarapa, North Island, New Zealand, is part of the exposed East Coast Deformed Belt at the obliquely convergent plate boundary of the Hikurangi margin. The sedimentary succession includes an allochthonous unit of Early Cretaceous greywacke basement resting on latest Cretaceous rocks. Since the unit's basal contact is subparallel to the bedding of the strata it overlies, the allochthon is inferred to be an unrooted gliding nappe similar to allochthonous outliers described in Northland and the Raukumara Peninsula. The southward emplacement of this “Greywacke Nappe” is supported by structural markers in the body of the nappe and is well dated as earliest Miocene by the youngest rocks involved, which are earliest Miocene (Waitakian; c. Aquitanian), and because Otaian‐Altonian (c. Burdigalian) faults postdate nappe emplacement. This thin‐skinned tectonic phase immediately preceded inception of dextral strike‐slip faulting along northeast‐trending Otaian‐Altonian (B...