More Te Papa

I could post endless pictures of the exhibits at Te Papa and never get anywhere close to capturing what is available there. But I thought I'd share a few more things from one of my recent visits.

This was just added this year - it is a modern version of a Wharenui Carved House on a Marae. It is hard to see the detail, but I recommend that you click on it to make it bigger, because it is a stunning work of art! The varied pastel colours are definitely new and different, because Māori art is usually bright red and black. 

Check out this kiwi egg! Notice how it is almost as big as the whole, entire bird?!?! I learned that kiwi eggs are six times bigger than the eggs of similarly sized birds. And the egg takes up 20% of the mother's body (compared to 5% for a pregnant woman). While that is amazing enough, what I don't understand is how it gets out!!

Biologists hypothesize that this size mis-match is due to kiwi birds have decreased in size over generations, while the egg remained the same size. Craziness!

There is a beautiful outdoor "bush" area of the museum, my favourite part of which is this bridge.

This rock formation shows geological movements and the way strata can be jammed together and shifted due to fault lines around New Zealand.

This is one of my favourite things about the museum, although it is very depressing if you actually think about it. It is a computer game, where you're going to a new "planet" (NZ) and you have to pick, from these plants and animals, what you will take to help you survive in this unknown place. I thought this seemed very exciting, and enthusiastically picked my four and off I went. Two of my chosen creatures could not survive in the new climate, and the other two thrived to such an extent that they destroyed the local ecosystem. Thinking I had picked poorly, I tried again, eventually cycling through all the choices. Turns out, no matter what you pick, the results are disastrous. Your creatures either die or kill everything around them. Hmmm... I wonder what the moral of the story is? Perhaps introduced species are not particularly welcome in this wonderful, unique NZ ecosystem? And no wonder.

On a similar note, they have a huge storage container that you have to walk through, trying to find all the pests or other dangers that might be inadvertently being brought to NZ by boat. I found it very wonderful that it asked me to pretend to be from MPI, since that's where J works. Good thing I don't work there, though, because I would have missed a lot of invaders.