As a botany curator, Heidi Meudt pays a lot of attention to plants, however, she is also curious about the other living things she sees when out in the field. When she was on Motu Maha Auckland Islands in January 2023, she tried to photograph as many of these non-plantRead more
Our curators and researchers worked together with colleagues from NIWA and the Australian Museum to solve this century-old mystery. Rodrigo Salvador takes us through what they found.Read more
Curator of Invertebrates Rodrigo Salvador led the team investigating how science communication of invertebrate animals is done and how the general public feels about it. Here he talks about some of the findings.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
A new DNA study by our researchers Rodrigo Salvador and Lara Shepherd revealed an unexpected land snail family across the Pacific.Read more
Endangered giant snails that suck up earthworms like spaghetti are living in a small colony in Khandallah. Curator Invertebrates Rodrigo Salvador tells us more.Read more
Te Papa holds a surprising treasure trove of tropical land snails in its collection. These snails have important biological data to share, but remained overlooked for the last century – until Rodrigo Salvador became interested…Read more
Did you know snails can live in the desert? Natural history researcher Rodrigo Salvador tells us a little about a curious set of fossils discovered in Algeria.Read more
Science Researcher Rodrigo Salvador compares the squid fossils of a fictional Middle-earth and those found in the ‘real’ one, New Zealand. Middle-earth: Shadow of War is the latest Lord of the Rings game, released late last year for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. In it, you continue the adventure of GondorianRead more
Bruce Marshall is a self-taught malacologist (shell expert) who has worked at Te Papa, and the previous National Museum, since 1976. As collection manager of molluscs, Bruce is responsible for a vast collection of several million specimens representing more than 4,700 New Zealand species. These range in size from tinyRead more
Richard (Dick) Dell specialised in the study of marine invertebrates, especially molluscs (shells). His interests and expertise also included crustaceans, and one of the more memorable names that he coined was for a spectacular deep water crab. Te Papa turned 150 years old on 8 December 2015. To celebrate 150Read more
When did kiwi and tuatara arrive in New Zealand and how did they get here? These are the kinds of questions being answered by some amazing fossil discoveries that have been made in Otago in the last few years. I’ve been part of a team of researchers visiting fossil sitesRead more
Te Papa’s curator of terrestrial vertebrates Dr Colin Miskelly recently visited the Poor Knights Islands Nature Reserve, off the Northland coast, as part of a research team tracking the at-sea movements of Buller’s shearwaters. The project is led by Graeme Taylor of the Department of Conservation, and is intended toRead more
Preparations for the colossal squid thaw are well underway, with construction of a temporary tank with a capacity to hold 10,000 litres of preservative. The tank is being built by Te Papa’s building services team and is 6.5 m long by 2 m wide. The logistics for moving the frozenRead more
