Between November 2022 and February 2023, Te Papa Natural History interns Tobia Dale and Ben Carson assisted with the curation of three major donations of Aotearoa New Zealand pepeketua and mokomoko. In this fourth and final blog about their work, they highlight some very special frogs that they were privilegedRead more
Between November 2022 and February 2023, Te Papa Natural History interns Tobia Dale and Ben Carson assisted with the curation of three major donations of New Zealand frogs and lizards. In this third blog about their work, Tobia describes her attempt to track down the first evidence of a deadly fungus in Aotearoa New Zealand.Read more
Between November 2022 and February 2023, Natural History interns Tobia Dale and Ben Carson assisted with the curation of three major donations of New Zealand frogs and lizards. Following their first blog on processing pickled pepeketua (native frogs), this second blog describes their processing of a large collection of native lizards from the 1980s, and an opportunity to see several of these species in the wild on Mana Island.Read more
I recently spent a week on Norfolk Island collecting ferns. One non-fern plant I was particularly keen to see was harakeke (Phormium tenax), on which I’ve done recent genetic work. On Norfolk Island it is known as flax, so I’ll use that name here. What I hadn’t appreciated before the trip was the significance of flax to the settlement of Norfolk Island.Read more
The iNaturalist City Nature Challenge is an annual event to see which city can record the most observations, species, and participants over a four-day period. 2023 was the third year that Wellington has participated. Science Researcher Lara Shepherd highlights some of the interesting discoveries made during the challenge. This yearRead more
Assistant Curator Natural History Andrew Stewart describes a recent specimen processed by the Fishes team – one of the more striking deep-water predators and relative to the barracouta (a.k.a. the Fisherman’s curse), a large oilfish called Ruvettus pretiosus. Read more
Three Te Papa botanists recently visited Norfolk Island together with colleagues from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. Their purpose was to collect ferns for research. Curator of Botany Leon Perrie introduces the significance of Norfolk Island’s ferns. Our research programme investigating the relationships and naming of Aotearoa New Zealand’s fernsRead more
Three of our botanists recently spent a week on Norfolk Island collecting ferns with colleagues from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. Our fern findings will be detailed in a future blog post but here we discuss interesting flowering plants that we saw – some of which were very familiar to us as New Zealanders but others were completely new!Read more
Speargrasses, with their sharp leaves and flower spikes, may look like a plant you want to avoid at all costs but a number of critters call them home, including the charismatic speargrass weevils. Science researcher Lara Shepherd introduces these weevils, plus some other critters that utilise speargrass plants. When IRead more
Mana Island, near Wellington, is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s conservation success stories. Farmed for more than 150 years, the island is now covered with forest that is overflowing with an abundance of endemic birds, lizards and insects. Using pairs of images taken 50 years apart, natural history curator Dr Colin Miskelly describes how and why the island was transformed from a farm to a thriving sanctuary.Read more
The large-leaved Aciphylla speargrasses or taramea are difficult plants to collect. Their rigid leaves are tipped in a sharp point and the bracts on their flower spikes are similarly ferocious. These defences are thought to have evolved to avoid browsing by moa, but they also work against botanists! Consequently, speargrasses are under‑represented in plant collections (herbaria). Te Papa Research Scientist Lara Shepherd and Botany Curator Leon Perrie describe how they approached sampling speargrasses on their recent collecting trip.Read more
How do museum curators decide what specimens to keep, or to give to the beetles to be reduced to bones, or dispose of? As Natural History summer interns, Ben Carson and Tobia Dale, were tasked with the job of processing three recently acquired research collections from prominent herpetologists Ben Bell, Ruth Ainsworth, and Phil Bishop.Read more
Read about Tora, a little boy with a big love for insects. Tora is determined to learn everything about his loved bugs and also to help them. One group of his favourite insects are bees, not the ones that produce native honey, but native bees that are crucial for Aotearoa New Zealand’s ecosystem. Bee inspired, Curator Invertebrates Julia Kasper shows us nature’s six-legged wonders through a child’s eye.Read more
Sun, rain, hail, mist and snow – Research Scientist Lara Shepherd and Botany Curator Leon Perrie encountered them all over an epic six-week plant collecting trip late in 2022. Their aim was to collect Aciphylla speargrasses for a research project to determine the number of species. Here is an overviewRead more
In 2017, Taranaki collector Alastair Johnson found the fossil of a giant petrel. Initially, it was encased in rock but careful preparation revealed something stunning. Not only was it a complete skull but it was the first fossil ever found of an intriguing kind of seabird. Two years later, Alastair found part of a wing bone of a giant petrel too. Both fossils are 3 million years old. Vertebrate Curator Alan Tennyson and Research Fellow Rodrigo Salvador describe the distinctions and fierce habits of giant petrels.Read more
