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Here we report an early Pleistocene occurrence of the New Zealand freshwater crayfish (kōura) Paranephrops White 1842 in the marginal-marine sediments of the Hautotara Formation, southeastern Wairarapa. The disarticulated parts are tentatively assigned to P. ?planifrons. This, to our knowledge, is the first fossil occurrence attributable to an extant species of Paranephrops, and only the second fossil occurrence of Paranephrops reported in the literature. This find provides a maximum constraint on the age of divergence of the two extant species of Paranephrops, and shows that post-glacial recovery of freshwater ecosystems in the North Island may have been rapid if the Northland refugium hypothesis for survival and dispersal of Paranephrops planifrons is accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]