This month we opened a mini-exhibition called Feathermania: Fashion to Die For based on one of the chapters in History Curator Claire Regnault’s recent book, Dressed: Fashionable Dress in Aotearoa New Zealand from 1840 to 1910.
Here, Claire describes some of the objects in the exhibition in more detail, including some of the problems associated with the popularity of rare bird feathers and the impact on their population as well as society.Read more
Curators Rodrigo Salvador and Alan Tennyson, working with colleagues from GNS Science and the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW), used chemical analysis on the sub-fossil bones of this extinct duck to determine how it lived. Here they describe what they found.Read more
Our DNA lab, the only museum-based one in New Zealand, celebrated its fifth anniversary last year. Research Scientist Lara Shepherd summarises what we’ve learned so far.Read more
Over the course of many years, a tidy collection of bird eggs has made its way across the world. The collection’s final resting place just so happens to be here at Te Papa, where Natural History intern Isabella Milner has steadily worked through cataloguing it, and packing the eggs away into their forever homes. Here she describes how eggs are identified despite having very little information to go on.Read more
While rummaging through cabinets, Curator Invertebrates Rodrigo Salvador found a two-centimetre treasure: the shell of an extinct snail from Saint Helena. Here he talks about the ecology of Saint Helena and how the snail ended up in a museum in New Zealand.Read more
The rowi is New Zealand’s rarest kiwi with only about 600 individuals left in the wild in a single population at Ōkārito. A number of suspected hybrids between rowi and little spotted kiwi have been found over the years.Read more
In December 2020, Te Papa botanists Heidi Meudt and Antony Kusabs were in the field with three North Island iwi: Tamakaimoana, Ngāti Porou, and Te Whānau-ā-Apanui. Worryingly, their search for rare forget-me-nots was unsuccessful. But their collaborative mahi struck a meaningful chord.Read more
Neither snow nor rain nor wind nor gloom of night stays these botanists. On a field trip to the South Island in January 2021, botanists Heidi Meudt and Antony Kusabs went to some extreme measures to collect forget-me-nots and other plants for our research and collections.Read more
The name Apteryx haastii was applied to great spotted kiwi in 1872. However, a recent study by Researcher Lara Shepherd, Vertebrate Curator Alan Tennyson, and collaborators, has shown that Apteryx haastii is not what we thought it was.Read more
To mark the recent Rotuman Language Week 2021, Senior Curator Pacific Histories and Cultures Sean Mallon shares two rare stories of Rotuman travellers who found their way to New Zealand in the early 1800s, and how a contemporary Rotuman artist has remembered one of them.Read more
Wellington recently competed in the iNaturalist City Nature Challenge. During the four days of the Challenge people recorded as many observations and species as possible. Science researcher Lara Shepherd was shocked that the introduced weed old man’s beard was the second-equal most observed species in Wellington. Read more
Forty years ago saw the first media reports of HIV/AIDS. Te Papa’s Gareth Watkins reflects on the timeline of the pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand’s history, which sees a number of significant anniversaries in the coming weeks.Read more
How many species of plants and animals do you think you could find in only four days? This year Wellington participants in the iNaturalist City Nature Challenge found 1537 species! Our Researcher Lara Shepherd and Curator Botany Leon Perrie summarise what was discovered.Read more
Pacific curator Rachel Yates introduces a co-collecting project that took Te Papa to Tokelau’s three low-lying coral atolls in the South Pacific.Read more
A team of keen birders recently participated in an 11-day trip to the remote Kermadec Islands, about 800 km north-east of mainland New Zealand. Several of the species they encountered are rarely seen or photographed – in New Zealand or anywhere. Trip organiser Scott Brooks has loaded more than 70 of his stunning images from the trip on to New Zealand Birds Online. Curator Vertebrates (and NZ Birds Online administrator) Colin Miskelly showcases the best of Scott’s Kermadec bird images.Read more
