Can long-distance dispersal be inferred from the New Zealand plant fossil record?
Mike S. Pole Abstract New Zealand is generally thought to have been physically isolated from the rest of the world for over 60 million years. But physical isolation may not mean biotic isolation, at least on the time scale of millions of years. Are New Zealand’s present complement of plants the direct descendants of what originally rafted from Gondwana? Or has there been total extinction of this initial flora with replacement through long-distance dispersal (a complete biotic turnover)? These are two possible extremes which have come under recent discussion. Can the fossil record be used to decide the relative importance of the two endpoints, or is it simply too incomplete and too dependent on factors of chance? This paper suggests two approaches to the problem—the use of statistics to apply levels of confidence to first appearances in the fossil record and the analysis of trends based on the entire palynorecord. Statistics can suggest that the first appearance of a taxon was after New
