Huia are one of Aotearoa’s most well-known birds, despite going extinct over 100 years ago. Early European scientists were fascinated by the radically different bills of the male and female huia, a feature called sexual dimorphism. More recently scientists recognised the New Zealand wattlebird family, which includes huia, as one of three families worldwide containing the most extreme variation in bills. A new study by Massey University’s Gillian Gibb and Te Papa’s Lara Shepherd used DNA sequences to determine when the New Zealand wattlebird family and the extraordinary sexual dimorphism in huia evolved.Read more

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Botany Curator Heidi Meudt and colleagues have published a paper on what is special about the diversification of plants on islands, based on an investigation of the five best-studied island archipelagos, including New Zealand. Read on to find out more about their findings on the role of whole genome duplication – also known as polyploidy – in these island floras.Read more

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Te Papa Botany researchers Heidi Meudt, Jessie Prebble and Phil Garnock-Jones have recently co-authored a new paper in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society on the genus Veronica, which includes northern speedwells and New Zealand and Australian hebes. This paper is the first major publication from Heidi’s research stay in Oldenburg,Read more

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A key principle in the scientific classification of animals, plants, and other living things is that the system of scientific names reflects their relationships. This is because there is only a single evolutionary history, and it provides an objective basis by which to name life. As we learn more aboutRead more

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Unfortunately, the short answer is that we know very little about the origin of these little seabirds that are now perhaps the most abundant birds in the southern oceans. Prions are a form of petrel – also called ‘tubenoses’ or ‘Procellariiformes’ – a group which includes the albatrosses, fulmars, shearwaters,Read more

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I’m a co-author of a just-published scientific paper examining the evolution and classification of the Arthropteris climbing ferns. The paper was a real international collaboration, involving authors from China, Netherlands, France, United Kingdom, and New Zealand. It is unclear how many species there are of Arthropteris – probably somewhere betweenRead more

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