Te Papa Botany Curator Heidi Meudt has published a new comprehensive study on the pollen of southern hemisphere forget-me-nots (Myosotis, Boraginaceae). The new study is the third and final publication detailing the morphology of forget-me-not pollen using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The first two studies, published in 2016 and 2020,Read more
What have we learnt from our day of sunfish science? Sunfish are very hard to sex! The best we can say is that it’s a boy. We think. We’ll have to wait for the test results to determine conclusively whether it’s male or female. Jellyfish are delicious Although we can’tRead more
Te Papa recently received a rare sunfish specimen from Auckland Museum, so we decided to find out more about these mysterious ocean-dwelling animals. Here are our fascinating facts: 1.Sunfish don’t have a tail! Some people call them a ‘gigantic swimming head’ (which seems a bit rude). Instead of a tailRead more
What’s fishy, heavy, rarely seen and now at Te Papa? A sunfish – the world’s heaviest bony fish! This is a common sunfish, also called an ocean sunfish. Our specimen is the rarer sharp-tailed sunfish. When Andrew Stewart got an email with some very exciting pictures from Tom Trnski atRead more
