natural history – Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives

On the computer screen, little pieces of genetic code are being slotted together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Slowly but surely, the genetic whakapapa of an extinct creature from the distant past is being stitched together in front of your eyes.

Far from being Frankenstein’s monster risen from the dead, these genetic blueprints offer a unique opportunity to push through the mists of time to examine lost worlds and vanished lives in unprecedented detail…any maybe learn a thing or two in the process.

With the release of the latest trailer for Jurassic World: Dominion, palaeogenomics, the sequencing of the complete genetic blueprint of historical and ancient creatures, is back in the spotlight. And with that, the inevitable question of can we bring back extinct animals, let them run amok and eat lawyers. Scenes from Jasper Fforde’s fantastic Thursday Next series spring to mind with herds of mammoths roaming the UK and trampling country gardens, and Neanderthals running the public transport system. Continue reading “Reconstructing ancient genetic jigsaws: palaeogenomics comes of age.”

In an unassuming building at the top of Tory Street in Wellington lies buried treasure: the remains of a lost world that rivals Smaug’s hoard, but the equivalent of the five armies is closing in.

The proposed restructure of our national museum means we are in danger of losing the key to unlocking the secrets these biological taonga hold.

I meet Alan Tennyson, the Curator of Vertebrates, at Te Papa’s offsite collections facility. This home away from home holds a special place for me as a self-confessed fossil nerd. I owe my career and my lab’s research programme to the treasures housed in its basement and those of other New Zealand museums. I have been visiting Te Papa’s collections for nearly 15 years, working on everything from birds to seals, from cetaceans, (whales and dolphins), and reptiles to frogs, many of which will never be displayed to the public. The success of some of the biggest high-profile fossil bird research projects in recent years, (such as elephant birds and giant penguins), has been down to the perseverance of curators and collection managers at Te Papa. These seminal publications showed kiwi (Apteryx spp.) are most closely related to the extinct giant elephant birds from Madagascar (not a bunch of feathered Aussies) and that New Zealand once had the largest penguins in the world. Continue reading “Critically endangered but not lost: the fight to save Te Papa’s collections from extinction”