Fossils in the FRED database period types and time. (Image credit: GNS Science)
New Zealand is the only nation on the planet that has a basically total, open-access database of its recognized fossil record.
It’s existed for nearly 80 years, starting in 1946 as a filing cabinet packed with paper kinds at the New Zealand Geological Survey. The job was the effort of Harold Wellman– the pioneering geologist who notoriously found New Zealand’s 370-mile-long Alpine Fault– and a couple of others dealing with the very first geological mapping of the nation.
“They desired all set access to all this details in a standardized, available method,” stated James Crampton, a paleontologist at Te Herenga Waka– Victoria University of Wellington. “It was a fantastic concept.”
The types designated a map referral and an identification number to places, and taped the fossils seen or gathered there, in addition to notes on stratigraphy and the rocks’ grain size, weathering, and color.
Since it started so early in New Zealand’s clinical history, pulling the couple of existing records into the database “was workable in a manner that wasn’t workable anywhere else on the planet,” Crampton stated.
Approximately comparable databases do exist in other nations, and some, like the worldwide Paleobiology Database, consist of more records. None has such density of protection of a whole area, stated GNS Science’s Chris Clowes, the existing custodian of the Fossil Record Electronic Database– called FRED.
The fossil record is an incredibly partial chronicle of life in the world, he’s mindful to explain. New Zealand has an exceptionally abundant chest of fossils, particularly from the Late Cretaceous and later durations, and the database represents “a really total protection of the insufficient record that we have. Of the fossils we have, a big percentage of them have actually been caught,” Clowes stated.
Get the world’s most remarkable discoveries provided directly to your inbox.
Related: 1.6-billion-year-old fossils press back origin of multicellular life by 10s of countless years
Over the years, the records moved from physical to digital and the maps were recalibrated from royal to metric. FRED now includes more than 100,000 place entries, primarily from New Zealand, however likewise from the southeastern Pacific islands and the Ross Sea area of Antarctica.
The database is thought about “an icon of New Zealand geological literature,” according to a short article released in 2020 by Clowes and others.
Open to All
Anybody can register to gain access to FRED’s online website and make an entry. 4 managers from various universities evaluate the entries and repair apparent mistakes. “We have all sorts of individuals contributing information, from rank beginners to expert paleontologists,” Clowes stated.
In the years because its beginning, the database and the spirit of trust and partnership it embodies have actually ended up being a vital part of New Zealand’s geological and paleontological culture– and the envy of worldwide coworkers, stated Daphne Lee,