Te Papa strives to improve access to the collections for which it cares – online accessibility is part of this. Botany Curator Leon Perrie writes about the Botany Team’s mission this year to each make one thousand specimen images available online.Read more
Botany Curator Heidi Meudt and colleagues have formally described some new forget-me-nots in two published papers. Read on to learn their names, see what they look like, and discover more about them.Read more
Recently, Curator Invertebrates Entomology Dr Julia Kasper re-discovered a box of audio tapes stored alongside our entomology collection. They were recorded by Sir Charles Fleming in his pioneering study of our country’s cicadas in the 1960s and 70s. Intern Finlay Dempster explains the significance of these audio tapes and the man who made them.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
Earlier this year, Te Papa botanists hunted for uncommon forget-me-nots in a very special place: Hikurangi, East Cape.Read more
Botany Researcher Heidi Meudt and Collection Manager Antony Kusabs made new collections of forget-me-nots and other plants at some stunning but remote South Island sites in Feb 2020. Take a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to do remote field work, and enjoy some of the rewards of their hard work!Read more
Botany Researcher Heidi Meudt is on a mission to find and make new research collections of all native New Zealand forget-me-nots. It can be a challenge to find some of them, particularly if we don’t know a lot about them or where they are to be found. Read more
Field work is a key aspect of biodiversity research to locate and collect new specimens to study. Botany Researcher Heidi Meudt took two South Island field trips in Dec 2018 and Jan 2019 with two university students in tow. Combining research and training is often a great way to get scientific research done – but was it successful this time?Read more
Curator of Invertebrates Rodrigo Salvador tells about the discovery of a small but important collection of land snails that remained unnoticed in our collections since the 1930s. Read more
Te Papa staff were very sad to hear of the recent passing of Marion Florence Mackenzie (née Rodie) on 9 Apr in Queensland (1919–2020). We knew her as Mollie Rodie, the creator of many beautiful costume sketches for fundraising pageants and carnivals in the Second World War (1939–45), now held in Te Papa’s collections.Read more
‘Adkin’s photographs provide an honest, in-depth insight into rural life in New Zealand during the first half of the 20th century.’ Danielle Campbell, a Museum and Heritage Studies student at Victoria University, discusses her three favourite Leslie Adkin photographs that she came across during her summer internship at Te Papa.Read more
