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This feed currently contains the following newsitems (total count 1570):

    • Gen AI collection descriptions – is it a pass?
      • In their first Gen AI blog, Gareth and Katie left you hanging as to how the descriptions created using Generative Artificial Intelligence turned out. Before they show an example and talk about how they assessed the content, there were a couple of discoveries they made about supplying images to the AI model.

    • A new bird for New Zealand – Horsfield’s bronze cuckoo
      • Aotearoa New Zealand is a long way from anywhere. Despite being 2,000 km from the nearest continent, vagrant land birds regularly find their way across the Tasman Sea – though some don’t quite make it. Bird curator Colin Miskelly describes the latest new species to come to grief on our

    • How do you catalogue a 150-year-old library?
      • Te Aka Matua Research Library at Te Papa currently has a collection of over 60,000 books and supports the work of Te Papa kaimahi with its wide-ranging books and resources about Aotearoa New Zealand history, Pacific cultures, mātauranga Māori, art, natural history, and museum studies. The library was first mentioned

    • Sniffing out seabirds on Mana Island
      • Te Papa vertebrates curator Colin Miskelly recently spent 3 days on Mana Island following a conservation dog searching for well-concealed petrels in the lush vegetation. He kindly agreed to share a ‘blog with a dog’ with us. Miro is a 4-year-old German short-haired pointer cross. He is one of the

    • New genetic research puts endemic forget-me-nots in the spotlight
      • Aotearoa New Zealand is a hot spot for forget-me-nots (genus Myosotis), with about 50 species found here and nowhere else. Te Papa Botany Curator Heidi Meudt teamed up with botanist Jessie Prebble from Manaaki Whenua, and Massey University scientists Jennifer Tate, Sofie Pearson, and Weixuan Ning to generate and analyse quite a bit of new genetic data to study the taxonomy and relationships of endemic forget-me-nots. Their new paper paints a complex yet compelling picture of how these species have evolved and radiated throughout the mountains of Aotearoa New Zealand, and makes an important contribution to their taxonomic revision.

    • Benefits of insects to humans – Forensic entomology
      • “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” E.O. Wilson, father of the modern naturalist movement. In this series of blogs, Te Papa entomology curator

    • Colin Miskelly – a fine Fellow
      • We are dedicating this blog post to acknowledge two honours recently bestowed on one of our own, Curator Vertebrates Dr Colin Miskelly. He has been made a Fellow of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand and received the New Zealand Association of Scientists Cranwell Medal. A huge congratulations on these achievements, Colin!

    • Big name changes needed for New Zealand’s tiny landhoppers
      • Landhoppers are an important, but often overlooked, component of our invertebrate fauna. Northland entomologists Olly Ball and Steve Pohe teamed up with Te Papa geneticist Lara Shepherd and University College Cork’s amphipod expert Alan Myer to summarise the current knowledge of New Zealand’s landhoppers. Their new paper shows that landhoppers are far more diverse than we thought, with many new species hiding right under our feet.

    • Unlocking collections: Casting new light with AI
      • The possibilities of using Generative AI in a positive way to enhance collection accessibility and findability has sparked a pilot project by history curator Katie Cooper and Collections Data Manager Gareth Watkins. In the first of a series of blogs, Katie and Gareth take you on their AI journey.

    • Birds of the Hump Ridge Track
      • The Hump Ridge Track was officially opened as Aotearoa New Zealand’s eleventh Great Walk in late October 2024. Te Papa natural history curator Dr Colin Miskelly walked the track a few weeks later and compared its birdaciousness with the ten other Great Walks. The newest Great Walk The Hump Ridge

    • Exploring nature in our cities – new documentary released
      • For the past four years, Te Papa’s scientists Lara Shepherd and Leon Perrie have participated in the iNaturalist City Nature Challenge – a global competition that connects people with nature by encouraging them to record the wildlife in our cities. This year, as well as being behind the camera, we also had fun in front of the lens whilst being filmed for a short documentary about the challenge and goals.

    • Vampire folklore and the diseases transmitted by bloodsuckers
      • With Halloween coming up and summer around the corner, it is time for bloodsucking beasties to come out. Insect curator Julia Kasper specialises in flies and bloodsucking insects and has a strong interest in the historical and cultural aspects of entomology. Here, she sheds a bright light on the vampire world and explains what actually caused the diseases that were blamed on – and furthered the belief in – the vampire.

    • A rabbit’s fur: Documenting the natural world through art
      • This September, students from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Design Innovation visited Te Papa to learn about animal illustration. Art curators Rebecca Rice and Lizzie Bisley showed them a group of artworks from across the collection. Starting with Albrecht Dürer’s 1505 engraving The large horse, the works ranged from the 16th to 20th centuries, showcasing a huge variety of styles, techniques, and approaches to representing animals. After looking at these works, the students drew their own animal illustrations in Te Papa’s Te Taiao | Nature space. Curator Art Lizzie Bisley discusses how it went.

    • Museum collecting: Acknowledging our Colonial past
      • When we think about New Zealand’s national museum, we often think about Te Papa, with its enormous building on the waterfront and bicultural philosophy. ‘Our Place’. Or we might imagine the National Museum at Buckle Street with the National War Memorial or the carillon standing tall in front – a place you might remember visiting as a child. But our national museum’s history begins over 100 years before that, in 1865, to be exact. Curator Mātauranga Māori Amber Aranui takes us back to this creatively documented time.

    • The pāua that clings to the sea: a new species of abalone found only in waters off a remote New Zealand island chain
      • The discovery of the Manawatāwhi pāua, unique to the Three Kings Islands, highlights the need to build taxonomic expertise to speed up work to describe thousands of as-yet unnamed species. Authors Kerry Walton, Curator Invertebrates, Te Papa, Hamish G Spencer, Sesquicentennial Distinguished Professor of Zoology, University of Otago, and Nic Rawlence, Associate Professor in Ancient DNA, University of Otago discuss the ramifications of the new find. This article was first published on The Conversation, 3 September, 2024.

    • The blob blog
      • This Psychrolutes microporos, also known as “Mr Blobby,” the blobfish, is the iconic ambassador for The Deep Sea and personifies everything we air-breathers seem to find weird about it. The image, one of the internet’s first viral memes, has been claimed by a myriad of organisations, usually without the actual photographer

    • Experiment to plug Te Papa collections into ChatGPT
      • It would be hard to miss that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen an exponential rise in programming, availability, use, and debate in the last few years. Here at Te Papa, we’ve been looking at possible use cases for the Digital Museum, and investigating safe ways to connect the collections to visitors. In this blog, Collections Data Manager Gareth Watkins describes his experiments with ways Generative AI can tell richer stories and enable deeper connections to our collection database.

    • Enamelling tools at Te Papa: inside the Blaxall Collection
      • In 1997 Te Papa purchased approximately 1000 nineteenth- and twentieth-century silversmiths and jewellers’ tools. The collection was started by jeweller Norris Blaxall in the early 1920s and his son Kevan continued to assemble and document the collection. Jessa Roylands, a Museum Studies student at Victoria University of Wellington, has been researching the tools, and shares some insights into the process of creating beautiful, glossy enamelled jewellery.

    • The Sāmoan Manumea – how can museums help to protect this national treasure?
      • The Manumea, or tooth-billed pigeon (Didunculus strigirostris), is an endemic bird of Sāmoa, currently on the brink of extinction. How can museums help to protect this national treasure? In this blog, Research Assistant Annika Sung examines how Te Papa’s collections can teach us about the Manumea and its entwined relationship to various aspects of Sāmoan life and culture.

    • Researching the research (expeditions)
      • As Wikipedian in Residence at Te Papa, Siobhan Leachman researched the research expeditions the museum has undertaken since the Colonial Museum was founded in 1865. Siobhan and Digital Channels Outreach Manager Lucy Schrader show how sharing this information through the open linked data platform Wikidata has made it easier to learn about the expeditions and what they discovered.

    • Online learning with Te Papa and Khan Academy
      • Te Papa is excited to announce a new partnership with Khan Academy, a not-for-profit educational organisation with a mission to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Online Course Content and Facilitation Lead Mel Thompson explores what courses are available.

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