Valuable Central Otago lichen specimens destroyed by Australian border officials included a sample so important government approval was needed before it could leave New Zealand.
The six specimens - owned by Crown Research Institute Landcare Research - were destroyed in Sydney last year, Landcare announced yesterday.
Australian border officials have given assurances the destruction of important scientific specimens would not happen again, and said the actions had contravened their own procedures.
A loan from the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France, was also destroyed, in Brisbane.
The samples of the Buellia macularis lichen - gathered by various collectors in Central Otago between 1937 and 2010 - were part of Landcare's collection of 650,000 specimens kept at the Allan Herbarium, in Lincoln.
One of the specimens was classified as a ''type'' specimen, which are of special scientific value and require approval from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage before they can be taken out of New Zealand.
The other five specimens were not ''type'' specimens but were ''very valuable and good representatives of this species'', a Landcare spokesman said.
The specimens had been identified by the late David Galloway, of Dunedin, New Zealand's foremost lichenologist, the spokesman said.
The specimens had been sent to Australia through New Zealand Post for research there.
The Buellia macularis lichen was originally regarded as endemic to New Zealand, but recently similar specimens had been found in Australia.
To find out if the Australian species was the same, the Allan Herbarium had loaned the specimens to researchers at the Australian National Herbarium in Canberra.
On Monday, managers from the Australasian Herbarium Collections met the plant operations import branch of Australia's Department of Agriculture and Water Resources (DAWR).
The DAWR officials gave assurances future herbarium specimens would safely transit through border control.
Following the incident, Landcare had suspended exports of specimens from its Allan Herbarium to Australia. Specimens would be loaned again once the DAWR assurances had been formalised in writing, herbarium director Ilse Breitwieser said.
Dr Breitwieser said Australian researchers needed new specimens of the Central Otago lichen.
However, New Zealand had lost a vast amount of expertise with the death of Dr Galloway (in December 2014) and it was not known how his research on lichens would continue or when new specimens could be collected.
