Boiling water and the stench of sulphur hardly seem a combination conducive to life, yet some bacteria thrive in such hostile environments. Biologists are beginning to think that the first life forms ...

Lampreys have done without bones—even jaws—for 360 million years, making do instead with a mouthful of rasps designed for shredding. But those teeth are no match for a new and invisible enemy. Are ...

Here we are—a nation of parents, grandparents and children all in the same boat, together at home. He waka eke noa. Every day of the lock-down we will post a story or video and set of activities that ...

Zip, pip, chuck, goes the call of Aotearoa’s smallest bird. It may turn out to be one of the earliest forms of language. On the flanks of Harbour Cone, on the Otago Peninsula, riflemen nest in the ...

In 1834, the Englishman William Swainson was at the height of his scientific career. Aged 45, loaded with honours from the scientific academies and institutions of Paris, Quebec, South Africa, ...

Picture the moa. A flightless feathered giant, reminiscent of an emu or cassowary. Over the last decade, genetic and skeletal evidence has begun to trace its family tree back to the age of the ...

People and livestock gobble so much fish that the seas soon won’t keep up. Is the answer to grow fish on land? After decades of research, scientists are cracking the secrets to commercially ...

In March of this year, a special courier arrived in Wellington from France carrying a rather unimpos­ing stuffed lizard for dis­play at the National Museum. This specimen ­described by one ...

This massive buttress stands below Pilot Point Road, and one can see down the coast to White Cliffs and Mt Taranaki. Sand scour prevents the growth of mussels and algae on most rocks. Sea caves are ...

The iconic puriri moth is the elephant of New Zealand’s 30 species of swift moth. Its life is brief. The adult moth lives for only 48 hours after as long as five years as a larva. And with no ...

The proposed Kermadecs Ocean Sanctuary stretches over 620,000 square kilometres of sea, pocked with small rocky islands and riddled with underwater volcanoes and deep trenches. It supports life not ...

In the South Island’s remote subalpine regions, a highly terrestrial songbird—one of two surviving species of New Zealand wren—has hopped, chirped and flown in the face of extinction. There are four ...