Two Te Papa botanists recently spent a week collecting ferns on Lord Howe Island. They were adeptly guided by Lord Howe Island museum curator Ian Hutton and joined by Daniel Ohlsen from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. The natural history of Lord Howe Island was introduced in an earlier blogRead more
Two Te Papa botanists recently spent a week collecting ferns on Lord Howe Island. They were adeptly guided by Lord Howe Island museum curator Ian Hutton and joined by Daniel Ohlsen from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. Lord Howe Island is a nature-lovers’ paradise with much of the island protected in reserve and mammal pests recently eradicated. Our fern findings will be detailed in a future blog post but here Lara Shepherd and Leon Perrie discuss the natural history of Lord Howe Island and introduce some of its flowering plants.Read more
In January 2023, Te Papa Botany Curator Heidi Meudt was one of a team of Aotearoa New Zealand botanists and crew who travelled to Motu Maha Auckland Islands to undertake botanical research and make new collections. Here, she provides an overview of Motu Maha Auckland Islands, how and why they travelled there, and an introduction to this blog series about their 2023 Strannik Auckland Island Expedition.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
Botany Curator Leon Perrie writes about why kōwaowao, hound’s tongue fern has had a scientific name change from Microsorum pustulatum to Lecanopteris pustulata.Read more
Botany curator Leon Perrie describes how a New Zealand fern’s closest relative has turned up in an unexpected place.Read more
Skirts, scales, hexagons, and colour. There are many differences you can look out for if you want to learn how to identify tree ferns.Read more
In 2015, ecologists Chris Stowe and Claire Newell found a strange fern during a vegetation survey in Whirinaki Forest, in the eastern North Island. They sent a frond to Te Papa’s fern experts Leon Perrie and Patrick Brownsey, who were also puzzled. This fern was clearly a Dicksonia tree fern but didn’t match any known species. Was it a new species?Read more
Botanist Leon Perrie recently posted about the desirability of minimising taxonomic name changes. He writes here about the need to change the name of a fern to reflect its newly discovered evolutionary relationships.Read more
What is an appropriate amount of change in our scientific classification of life? Botany Curator Leon Perrie ponders this using the kiokio and its fern relatives as an example.Read more
Congratulations to Pat Brownsey who has just been awarded the New Zealand Journal of Botany annual prize for 2016. In even-numbered years, this prize is for “established researchers”. This is “awarded to a person who has made a sustained contribution to the journal during the last five years (regularly publishingRead more
Fieldwork can be as easy as reaching out of the car window to sample a tree. Or it can be a bit more challenging.Read more
Gully fern, also called pākauroharoha and Pneumatopteris pennigera, is one of the most common ferns in New Zealand. You’ll have almost certainly seen it if you’ve ever walked in a New Zealand forest. It occurs from the north of the North Island to the south of the South Island (althoughRead more
Filmy ferns add a delicate, enveloping beauty to New Zealand’s forests. Most are translucent, with fronds only one or a few cells thick. Most are small, but they can carpet large areas of the ground or be prominent on the trunks of trees. New Zealand is home to 31 speciesRead more
Please note: This fern has since been named. The You Called Me What?! exhibition celebrates 150 years of scientific discovery at Te Papa. A big part of this has been the scientific naming of more than 2500 animal and plant species by museum staff since 1865. We’re now giving youRead more
