Research

MV palaeontologist Tom Rich, along with colleagues Roger Benson, Patricia Vickers-Rich, and Mike Hall, today published a review of all the theropod dinosaurs known from early Cretaceous period deposits in southern Australia. In doing so, they present the first complete snapshot of local theropod diversity around 120-105 million years ago.

Theropods are a group of mostly carnivorous dinosaurs that walked on two legs and had three-toed feet. Included among the theropods are the infamous T.rex, the small and agile Deinonychus, the feathered Archaeopteryx and modern birds. Tom and his colleagues have been pulling theropod fossils out of Victoria's coastline deposits since the 1970s and in this review, they considered 37 bones and over 90 individual teeth. They conclude that the local Cretaceous theropod fauna comprised nine major groups (or taxa), including allosauroids, tyrannosauroids, spinosauroids and the recently-discovered ceratosaur.

Some of the fossils reviewed in this examination of southern therapod diversity. These are large theropod manual phalanges, or bones from the 'hands' of these dinosaurs.
Source: Benson et al.  

A summary cladogram (evolutionary tree) of the therapod dinosaurs, showing the relationships between the major groups within the suborder Therapoda.
Source: Benson et al.  

Like the unique fauna of Australia living today, our prehistoric fauna was distinctive too, with some groups dominating the fossil record and others seemingly absent. In the past, palaeontologists have considered several explanations why the types of dinosaurs that lived in Australia were so different to the types found in other continents, even our nearby Gondwanan neighbours. Did certain groups evolve in other continents after Gondwana had split up, so those groups never dispersed to Australia? Or were there patterns of regional extinctions reflecting the differences in climate between the continents as they drifted apart?

As more fossils are uncovered and studied, the picture gets a little clearer. It now appears that many high-level dinosaur taxa, such as the tyrannosauroids and allosauroids, emereged earlier than previously estimated and were distributed all over the world during the Jurassic. This suggests they've been missing from Australian records simply because our dinosaur fauna is poorly known. The Australian fossil record is patchy – whether it's because the fossils have not been preserved or simply not discovered or properly interpreted yet – and often only one or two bones represent an entire group of animals.

However the isolation of Gondwana and Australia from the rest of the world, and the unique conditions here, did help shape a unique assemblage at the species level. During the early Cretaceous, Australia was still attached to Antarctica and was much closer to the South Pole than it is now. Earth's climate was much warmer, the poles were free of icecaps and Victoria and Antarctica were covered in lush, ferny temperate forests. Long periods of winter darkness and extended summer daylight influenced the evolution of endemic dinosaurs whereas in other parts of the world, their distant relatives were contending with quite different environments.

Approximate position of Australia 120 million years ago during the Cretaceous era.
Image: Ron Blakey. Altered by Cally Bennet and Fons VandenBerg
Source: Colorado Plateau Geosystems  

The possibility remains that some dinosaurs, such as the long-necked quadrupedal sauropods, which were present in Queensland but have not been found in Victoria, could not survive in cool, dark Cretaceous southern Australia and and so they did not enter this area.

Links:

Benson RBJ, Rich TH, Vickers-Rich P, Hall M (2012) Theropod Fauna from Southern Australia Indicates High Polar Diversity and Climate-Driven Dinosaur Provinciality. PLoS ONE 7(5): e37122.doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037122

Monash University: The killer dinosaurs of south-eastern Australia

600 Million Years: Victoria evolves

Dinosaur Walk

MV News: Victorian tyrannosauroid found

Your Question: I noticed that the On their own exhibition about Britain's child migrants exhibition is closing, where is it off to?

On their own, the story of Britain's child migrants will be moving on from the Immigration Museum in Melbourne to the Western Australian Museum - Maritime in Fremantle, due to open on Saturday May 19th.

On their own exhibition at the Immigration Museum.
Image: Kate Brereton
Source: Museum Victoria  

The exhibition was very popular with visitors to the Immigration Museum, many of whom commented about the moving nature of the content. Sadly, it is a story that has gone unnoticed for many years, but we were glad to be able to host the exhibition and provide visitors with a rich understanding and experience.

On their own exhibition at the Immigration Museum.
Image: Kate Brereton
Source: Museum Victoria  

Lisa snapped some pictures today of the Museum Victoria Collection Management and Conservation team and the Australian National Maritime Museum Collection Management and Conservation team working on de-installing the exhibition, getting it ready for its move across the country.

De-installing the On their own exhibition at the Immigration Museum.
Image: Lisa Collins
Source: Museum Victoria  

De-installing the On their own exhibition at the Immigration Museum.
Image: Lisa Collins
Source: Museum Victoria  

Although the exhibition is leaving Melbourne, we still do have plenty of information for visitors in the Immigration Discovery Centre, and online. The exhibition website will remain active until November 2013, so there is still an opportunity for you to learn more about Britain's child migrants.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links

MV Blog post - On their own opens

On their own: Britain's child migrants

Mel helps manage MV's Marine Invertebrates collections. In her spare time she works with honorary associate Mark O’Loughlin and others to develop her specialist knowledge of holothuroids, or sea cucumbers.

Ice was what I saw from my porthole each morning as I’d wake yet again to the realisation... Woohoo! I’m in Antarctica!

What a wonderful realisation it was. For nearly two months this summer my home was the British ice-strengthened research vessel the RSS James Clark Ross, and I loved every minute of my freezing, rolling, ice-crunching scientific voyage. On board at the invitation of the British Antarctic Survey and with the support of Museum Victoria, I was part of the biological research team tasked with collecting marine benthinc invertebrates from the shelf and slopes of the Weddell Sea in Western Antarctica.

View from the top of the RSS James Clark Ross
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

My regular work in the museum's Marine Invertebrate Collections held me in good stead to assist the biological team with our daily work of collecting, sorting, identifying, preserving, and DNA-sampling specimens as we brought these bottom-dwelling 'beasties' up in nets and sleds from the ocean floor. Our aim was to assess the biodiversity and evolutionary history of the area, and my particular focus was on sea cucumbers (holothuroids) which I have studied for a number of years now under the mentorship of Museum Victoria honorary associate Mark O'Loughlin.

The biology team
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: British Antarctic Survey

Relatives of animals such as the sea star, many sea cucumbers actually look more like sausages with tentacles (which explains their name), and have developed a variety of different feeding and reproductive methods to adapt to environments worldwide. They are diverse in Antarctic waters with over 180 species (including many undescribed) recorded south of the Antarctic Convergence, and as such, they make a good group for evolutionary study. Often coming up squashed in trawls they can be tricky to identify, but the key lies in a variety of identifiers from tentacle shape and number, to tube-foot arrangement and the tiny little skeletal remnants known as 'ossicles' which can be viewed in dissolved tissue under a microscope.

Sea cucumbers and bivalves clinging to urchin spines.
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

With my previous experience of Antarctic sea cucumbers limited to pickled museum specimens, I was very excited to finally see these animals in living colour! They were amazingly diverse, from the tiny Psolids which clung to sea-urchin spines, to my favourite football-shaped 'sea-pigs' which the ship crew were delighted to see. We even got some footage (from cameras lashed to one of our collecting sleds) of different species feeding and moving about on the sea floor.

Along with sea cucumbers we saw many other amazing critters, from nets crawling with sea spiders to beautiful glass sponges filled with brittle stars and deep-sea fish with 'lights' attached to their heads... and that was just from below the water! On top we saw breaching Minke whales, majestic Emperors and curious (and chatty) chin-strap penguins against the always gorgeous background of floating icebergs. Stopping in the sub-Antarctic British Base at Signey to help close up for winter, we even had the chance to see (while firmly holding our noses) the huge elephant seals which roll their way around the camp.

Emperor penguin (left), Elephant seals at the UK’s Signy base
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

Skeletons of sea cucumbers, MV Blog post, April 2011

Who knew that within Melbourne Museum there are two rooms not considered to be in Australia?

Every year Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS) officers confiscate thousands of objects being brought illegally into the country through the post, airports and seaports. These items include food, drugs, plants and even live animals.

King Baboon tarantula (Citharischius crawshayi)
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Such illegal items can pose a significant risk to Australian wildlife. Tarantulas are a long-lived spider which can produce thousands of eggs each year. If they were to become established in the wild exotic tarantulas would have the ability to decimate populations of small native animals.

In 1996 a population of Mexican Redrump tarantulas (Brachypelma vagans) was discovered in a citrus field in Florida, America. The population is believed to have stemmed from one gravid (carrying eggs) female who was released after she was no longer wanted as a pet. Over 100 individuals were found in a single survey of the 40 acre property. The Mexican Redrump tarantula is not native to Florida but has been imported for the pet trade since the 1970s. It is thought that this incidence of releasing an exotic pet has alone caused devastating effects on local fauna. With Australia's warm climate it would be easy to find ourselves in a similar situation to Florida if we didn't enforce strict quarantine measures.

Mexican Redrump tarantula (Brachypelma vegans)
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Tarantulas with their unique markings, behaviours, and basic husbandry are popular pets in Europe and America. Many species are illegally transported around the world with collectors willing to pay hundreds of dollars for specimens. In Australia there are numerous species of native tarantulas that can be kept legally as pets.

Venezuelan Sun Tiger tarantula (Psalmopoeus irminia)
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Queensland whistling tarantula (Selenocosmia crassipes)
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria   

But what happens to the items AQIS confiscate? Many items are destroyed to protect Australia's precious ecosystem. However, some lucky spiders are spared. They get used by museums and zoos to act as educational aids.

Quarantine room enclosures off display at Melbourne Museum
Image: Chloe Miller
Source: Museum Victoria  

Melbourne Museum is home two quarantine rooms where we house 14 tarantulas that were confiscated by AQIS. These spiders are housed under strict conditions which meet AQIS standards. These standards include the treatment of objects leaving the rooms such as waste, water, uneaten food and other implements. These items must be double bagged, recorded and frozen at minus 20 degrees for six weeks. The quarantine room is not considered to be in Australia territory but a grey zone within Australia.

Bugs Alive! Quarantine room at Melbourne Museum
Image: Chloe Miller
Source: Museum Victoria  

One quarantine room at the museum is located within the Bugs Alive! gallery and allows visitors to see its inner workings through a glass viewing wall, while the other room is located behind the scenes.

Our display spiders are fed every fortnight on Saturdays. One of our 'behind the scenes' spiders is fed weekly on Fridays at 3pm live on the web.

Tarantula feeding live on the internet
Image: Chloe Miller
Source: Museum Victoria  

Currently on display via the webcam is a Brazilian Salmon Pink tarantula (Lasiodora parahybana). Brazilian Salmon Pinks are the third largest species of tarantula with a leg span reaching 25cm.

Brazilian Salmon Pink tarantula (Lasiodora parahybana)
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Equipped with urticating (stinging) hairs to flick at predators, she only uses her fangs as a last resort. This girl is a keen feeder, often climbing up the keeper's forceps to get to its prey.

Brazilian Salmon Pink fact sheet from WAZA

Brazilian Salmon Pink Birdeater from Australian Reptile Park

Mexican Redrump Tarantula fact sheet [PDF 179KB] from the University of Florida

1996 Florida Mexican redrump tarantula incident

Your Question: What does the word megafauna mean?

The name megafauna means ‘big animals’, generally animals with a body mass of over 40 kilograms. Much of the time, megafauna is general term used to describe a particular group of large land animals that evolved millions of years after the dinosaurs became extinct. The extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago left a void of large land animals worldwide. Over millions of years, the surviving mammals, birds and reptiles evolved to include some very large animals. This group of megafauna was at their largest and most widespread during the Quaternary Period, in the last 2.5 million years.

  The skull and upper body of Diprotodon, the largest marsupial to have lived
Image: Michelle McFarlane
Source: Museum Victoria  

Australia’s Quaternary megafauna were unique, and included giant marsupials such as Diprotodon, huge flightless birds such as Genyornis (a distant relative to today’s ducks and geese) and giant reptiles such as Varanus ‘Megalania’ (related closely to living goannas and the Komodo Dragon), all three of which are displayed in Melbourne Museum’s Dinosaur Walk exhibition - despite the fact these animals are not dinosaurs at all.

The skeleton of Thylacoleo, the so-called marsupial 'lion'
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

Some more examples of Australian megafauna are also on display in the adjoining exhibition at Melbourne Museum called 600 Million Years: Victoria evolves, such as the curious-looking Zygomaturus and Palorchestes (both relatives of Diprotodon), the carnivorous Thylacoleo (sometimes called a marsupial ‘lion’), and some megafaunal relatives of kangaroos and wallabies such as Protemnodon.

  The skeleton of Zygomaturus, a Rhinoceros-like marsupial
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria  

It is worth noting that not all megafauna are extinct – Australia has living megafauna in the form of Red and Eastern Grey Kangaroos and Saltwater Crocodiles, some of which are on display in the Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world exhibition, which is also in the Melbourne Museum Science and Life Gallery.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Video, Studying Megafauna Fossils

Book, Prehistoric Giants: The Megafauna of Australia, published by Museum Victoria

Your Question: I’ve just returned from Malaysia and am curious about the history of the Malay community in Victoria. Do you have some resources you can recommend regarding on this topic and Malay cultures in general?

The Malay community in Australia is diverse, with people from a number of ethnic backgrounds and religions that reflect the diversity of Malaysia itself. The culture of the region that we today call Malaysia, which also includes parts of Borneo, has been shaped by interactions between the Malay, Arab, Chinese, Indian, European and South East Asian peoples from the middle of the 15th century. Intermarriage between people of various cultures from this early period, plus influxes of later Chinese, Indian and European settlers led to an ethnically diverse population, which is still obvious in the country today and is reflected in the Malay community in Australia.

Students from the Malaysian Students Association take part in Orientation Week, RMIT, February 2001.
Image: Jun Siew Goh / Photographer: Unknown
Source: Copyright Malaysian Students Association 2001  

The first stop for anyone wanting to do research on the Malaysian community in Australia is Immigration Museum’s Origins website. It tells us a little about the history of Malaysian immigration to Australia, as well as statistics from census data on the demographics of the Victorian Malaysian community.

Immigration from the Malaysia actually began in the mid 19th century and Malay workers were involved in the pearling industry, trepang, mining, agriculture, including cane fields. European descended Malays came to Australia during WWII. Following the end of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1973 Malaysian immigration increased and by 2006 there were 30,476 Malaysia-born Victorians and 92,335 in Australia. Most of these identified as ethnic Chinese (c 65,000), with smaller percentages of Malay (c 12,000), Indian (c 6,000) and other groups. English is the language most spoken in the home, followed closely by Cantonese, with smaller amounts of Malaysia-born Australians speaking Mandarin, Behasa Melayu, Tamil, other Chinese languages and Vietnamese.

Pencil Drawing by Thomas Le. It depicts the journey of of Mai Ho's family to Australia and shows their first few months here.
Image: Museum Victoria / Artist Thomas Le
Source: Copyright Thomas Le 1998  

Some famous Malaysia-born Australians include singer Guy Sebastian, politician Penny Wong and entertainer Kamahl.

Further details and statistics regarding Malaysian born people living in the wider Australian community can be found on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website and this factsheet produced by Department of Immigration and Citizenship. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has some great general information on Malaysia, its people and their relations with Australia.

In the Immigration Discovery Centre we have a variety of books on Malaysian history, culture, contemporary politics and the Malay community in Australia. While the IDC is not a lending library, you are welcome to come and browse the books we have here.

Couple cutting the wedding cake, at their wedding in Singapore
Image: Tuty Juhari / Photographer: Unknown
Source: Copyright Tuty Juhari 1997  

There are a number of other useful websites and resources for finding out about the Malaysian community in Victoria, including Melayu Melbourne, the Malay Education and Cultural Centre of Australia Inc (MECCA), Malaysian Students’ Council of Australia (MASCA) Victoria, 92.3 FM ZZZ, Malaysian show, and Australian-Malaysian Film Festival. 

Got a question? Ask us!

Tucked away from public view, kept in unlit, climate-controlled storage, the museum has millions of zoological specimens. Most of these are insects and other invertebrates but thousands are fish, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. On top of that, we have huge tissue collection: tiny pieces of animal tissue preserved in a sort of genetic library.

Learning this, you might ponder: why do we collect and keep so many specimens, and often, multiple specimens of the same species? As Victoria's official repository for examples of our state's fauna, wouldn't one of each species be enough? And why would we want specimens from outside Victoria?

These are very good questions and there are several reasons why.

Defining a species

Let's say you were out hiking and you found a hidden canyon that wasn't on your map. Within the canyon, you spot an unusual butterfly that's not in your field guide. In fact, it's not like anything you have ever seen before. How would you verify that it is species new to science? You would need to compare it with properly identified examples of other species. You'd probably find those examples in a museum.

There are strict rules for describing and naming new species; the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature oversees the process worldwide. To describe a new animal species you must lodge a holotype – the irreplaceable, single specimen that stands as the official representative of that species. It might take a few specimens, called a type series, to properly describe the species but there is only ever one holotype. Museum Victoria counts several thousand holotypes among our collections, including the Leadbeater's Possum, the Baw Baw Frog, and numerous invertebrates.

However one specimen can't possibly represent a whole species: what about the other sex? What if males and females are very different? Or the animal changes over its life cycle? Or the individuals from over here are slightly different to the individuals from over there? To get a full picture of all the variation within a species, we need many examples of that species.

Multiple examples of a few species of butterfly. Each individual specimen records the variation within a species.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Changes through time

Preserving five individuals of our hypothetical new butterfly that you caught during your hike is a good start. You might have examples of slightly different sizes or varying wing patterns. But what about next month or next year? How early do the butterflies emerge in spring, and when do they disappear in winter? Maybe next year the canyon receives lots of rain, the butterfly's food plant is plentiful, and the population is twice as large and each individual butterfly is fatter. You'll need some examples of this, too.

Collecting specimens over time records all sorts of useful information. It can indicate the incoming wave of an invasive species or the decline of a rare one. Physical changes in the animals themselves – their size, colour, pattern – can reflect changes in their environment but it requires a large number of data points over many years to detect patterns and work out why those changes might be occurring.

The museum's wet collection contains specimens in alcohol. These are marine crustaceans.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Future research

Natural history collectors of a century ago could not have imagined how we would use their specimens today. They didn't even know that DNA existed, let alone that it would one day help define and analyse species. Emerging technologies mean that we can return to old specimens again and again and keep learning new things. So-called 'next generation sequencing' means we can now look at the entire genome of an individual, every gene in their cells, where just a decade ago we could only look at a few marker genes. Genetic analysis can identify cryptic species – ones that can't otherwise be distinguished from closely-related species – and is useful for forensic questions such as determining the origin of smuggled wildlife. Museum collections are the source of tissue and reference specimens for these activities.

The museum's banks of freezers contain thousands of tissue samples.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Just like those collectors of old, we can only guess at the importance of today's collecting. Perhaps our hypothetical butterfly might experience a population explosion in the changing climate and become an important indicator of local conditions. That data set begins with those five specimens you collected on your weekend hike.

Links:

Lyman Entomological Museum: Why so many specimens?

The John Curtis British Insects Collection

The Field Museum: From Finches to Ostriches

Leo Joseph, 2011. Museum collections in ornithology: today's record of avianbiodiversity for tomorrow's world, Emu 111, i–xii  (PDF, 417 KB)

Significant objects in our collections can remain more or less anonymous simply because they have been detached from their stories. They sit there, quietly waiting for someone to spend some time with them and join the dots.

Two researchers working with the Indigenous Cultures collections recently made an exciting discovery that returns two objects with incomplete provenance to a very important body of work. It began with Rosemary Wrench, curator of the Many Nations section in First Peoples, the new exhibition that is under development for Bunjilaka. While the exhibition focuses on south-eastern Australian Aboriginal nations, the Many Nations section celebrates Indigenous culture from across the country. Rosemary's task is to curate over 600 examples of Indigenous artworks, tools and artefacts that tell the stories of the people who made them, used them, and continue to do so today.

"When I started looking for suitable items, I eliminated all the restricted material first," explains Rosemary. "Then I wanted objects we hadn't put on display before. I considered 14,000 to 15,000 objects and systematically started going through the collection stores because there was no other way to do it."

Last year she opened a cabinet full of boomerangs. One of them was carved with an extraordinary scene of two Aboriginal men hiding behind a tree, watching Europeans and their horses. She showed it to Jason Gibson, an Australian National University researcher working on the Spencer and Gillen Australian Research Council project. "Straight away, Jason said 'I think that's by Jim Kite'." Jim Kite Erlikilyika [from Alyelkelhayeka, meaning "he slipped" or "glided away"] Penangke (1865-1930) was a Lower Arrernte man from the Charlotte Waters area. He joined Spencer and Gillen's 1901-02 expedition as an interpreter and is recognised as an accomplished artist.

Boomerang made by Jim Kite, or Erlikilyika. Above: Upper side decorated with images of two stockmen and their packhorses and two Aboriginal men watching on. Below: Line art of the carved boomerang.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

The boomerang was purchased by the museum in 1946 from the estate of Herbert Basedow, a geologist, explorer and medical practitioner who worked in Central Australia and known collector of Aboriginal art. It came with no documentation at all. "It was clear to me from the style that it was Jim Kite's work but I had nothing to prove it," says Jason. Last month, he began searching for the proof for the artist behind this boomerang and another, exquisitely carved with hopping mice, from the Basedow collection.

Boomerang carved by Jim Kite Erlikilyika with two Spinifex Hopping-mice (Notomys alexis).
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum victoria  

In a newspaper article in the South Australian Register, Jason found a detailed interview about Jim Kite's 1913 art exhibition. "In the interview, he described this boomerang with two men hiding behind a tree." Not only was the creator of the boomerang identified, but the story behind the scene.

Detail of boomerang showing the explorers of John McDouall Stuart's expedition.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

Detail of boomerang showing two men hiding behind a tree.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

"According to Jim, these were Aboriginal people watching the first European explorer, John McDouall Stuart. When they saw a man dismount from his horse they were shocked because they thought the man and the horse were one entity. They'd never seen a horse and definitely never seen a white person." Jim Kite had captured a moment of 'first contact' from an Aboriginal point of view, making it an incredibly significant object. Erlikilyika was born five years after Stuart's arrival; the story he carved was told to him by people who saw it, whether they were members of his own family, or the people he interviewed when travelling with Spencer and Gillen. "Some people have described Erlikilyika as the first Aboriginal ethnographer because he was actively engaged with the interview process with Aboriginal people and made his own pictorial notes - markings to explain the Dreaming stories to Spencer and Gillen," continues Jason.

This discovery links previously unprovenanced objects back to Jim Kite Erlikilyika Penangke's story. Rosemary and Jason have also identified a whip handle and walking stick in the collection that they think could be the work of Jim Kite. Rosemary concludes, "it's very rewarding work, reconnecting these objects with their story."

Links:

Erlikilyika (1865–1930) in the Australian Dictionary of Biography

The expedition photographs of Herbert Basedow, National Museum of Australia

In their previous video, Dr Karen Rowe and Dr Karen Roberts reported the results of their mammal surveys of Wilsons Prom. They joined other MV scientists and Parks Victoria staff for the the rapid biodiversity survey, Prom Bioscan, of October 2011.

In this video, Karen and Karen talk about their work with the Mammology Collection at Museum Victoria and why the museum collects mammal specimens.

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

View all Prom Bioscan blog posts

MV Animal Ethics Procedures

Mammalogy Collection

Your Question: What did Caroline Chisholm do behind the Shelter Shed?

A bit of scrapbooking apparently...

Having such a large online presence, as Museum Victoria has, we in the Discovery Centre are always asked if we can provide copies of the brochures, passenger lists, workshop manuals, etc, that feature in our massive Internet Empire. In order to satisfy this demand, we have to apply subtle pressure on a variety of curators, collection managers and photographers, in order to have these articles scanned.

A page from Caroline Chisholm's scrapbook.
Image: Museum Victoria
Source: Museum Victoria  

However, in the case of Caroline Chisholm’s scrapbook, we can casually point out to the inquisitive enquirer, that by scrolling down the webpage, they will see the heading ‘Downloads’ followed by ‘Caroline Chisholm’s Scrapbook PDF 129.3 Mb’. Eureka! This unique piece of Australia’s history can be all yours at the click of a button. Now, at your leisure, you can peruse the pages of Caroline’s life and works.

Caroline Chisholm scrapbook, circa 1844-1861
Image: Museum Victoria
Source: Museum Victoria  

Who attended the ‘Soiree to Mrs. Chisholm’? Prince Albert did, that’s who. As did ‘The Ladies who have honoured us with their company’. Is one of your ancestors on ‘Mrs. Chisholm’s List of Missing Friends’? Margaret Lyons was looking for her brother Luck Lyons; Mrs. Tipple couldn’t find her husband Thomas Tipple and Mr. Wright could not be found which left his ‘Wife in great distress with six children’. And what did Charles Dickens say about Mrs. Chisholm? The answer can be found on ‘page 12’.

Caroline Chisholm scrapbook, circa 1844-1861
Image: Museum Victoria
Source: Museum Victoria  

Caroline Chisholm’s scrapbook is not the only scanned item available for download on our website, but it is a particular favourite of mine. Thanks to the unsung heroes of the museum – the MV Studios folk who scan these wonderful items, all your questions can now be answered. We salute you!

Got a question? Ask us!

Links 

Caroline Chisolm's scrapbook

Australian Dictionary of Biography Online

Your Question: Why are bird eggs so variable in their colours and patterns?

The colour and colour pattern of bird eggs vary enormously from species to species (and often between individuals of the same species, and sometimes between the eggs of the same mother).

  A tray of eggs from Museum Victoria's H.L White egg collection, showing the diversity of patterns and colours for a single species, the Australian Magpie Gymnorhina tibicen.
Image: Michelle McFarlane
Source: Museum Victoria  

Eggs are made of calcium carbonate, which is white. White is therefore the default colour for bird eggs, but many birds lay coloured or colourfully-patterned eggs. Why?

The colouration of bird eggs can often be explained by the animal's biology and behaviour. The eggs of ground-nesting birds, for example, need to be well-camouflaged to avoid discovery by predators. They are usually coloured and patterned to match the substrate they are laid upon.

The highly-camouflaged eggs of the American Golden Plover Pluvialis dominica, which nests on the ground.
Image: MeegsC
Source: Wikimedia Commons  

Tree-nesters, on the other hand, usually have blue or green eggs.

The American Robin, Turdus migratorius, which nests in trees, lays bright blue eggs.
Image: Laslovarga
Source: Wikimedia Commons  

Birds whose eggs are hidden from view (in hollows, burrows or deep nests), or who sit on their eggs continuously throughout incubation, tend to have white eggs.

  The now extinct Paradise Parrot Psephotus pulcherrimus, which laid its eggs in termite mounds, had white, unpatterned eggs.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

The patterns on eggs have developed over eons via natural selection – the better the camouflage, the more likely the eggs are to survive and pass on the genes for well-camouflaged eggs to the next generation. Ornithologists have classified egg patterns and given each "style" a name in order to distinguish them: splashed, blotched, spotted, dotted, marbled, streaked, scrawled, overlaid, capped, and wreathed.

Eggs from Museum Victoria's Ornithology Collection
Image: John Broomfield
Source: Museum Victoria

Colour also provides another form of protection: it is thought to act as a sunscreen, protecting the developing foetus from UV light. The addition of colour also strengthens the eggshell. Birds that are calcium-deficient lay thin-shelled eggs, which are more likely to break. Scientists have found that birds that have multiple clutches in a single season have more highly-coloured eggs in the second and subsequent clutches (when the mother's calcium supplies are reduced). Patterned colouration is also more common in areas with calcium-deficient soils.

The specific colours are incorporated into the shell in the final stage of egg development. Blue and green colour comes from a pigment called biliverdin (which is the same pigment that causes green bruises in humans). In egg colouration, biliverdin comes from bile; the red and brown colour on eggs comes from protoporphyrins, which comes from blood.

The Red-vented Bulbul Pycnonotus cafer lays red eggs.
Image: J. M. Garg
Source: Wikimedia Commons  

Australia's native birds are protected. It is illegal to collect eggs or to interfere with birds' nests without a permit. Details of regulations and permits can be obtained from the Department of Sustainability and Environment.

Links:

Museum Victoria's Ornithology Collection

H.L. White Collection of Australian Birds’ Eggs

The evolution of egg colour and patterning in birds

Australian Magpie Eggs

Hey check out www.portphillipmarinelife.net.au – the new Port Phillip Taxonomic Toolkit website we launched this week! It's a joint initiative between the Department of Sustainability and Environment, and us at the museum.

Left to right: Juvenile Scalyfin, jellyfish and biscuit stars in Port Phillip Bay.
Image: Julian Finn | Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

There is a spectacular gallery of over 2,000 photographs that make it the site to surf if you don't want to get wet this dive season. And if you do get wet, then it's the one place to learn about the cool stuff you've seen underwater.

Have a click around and find your favourite pretty fin or an awesome octopus!

Left to right: albatross, isopod and moray eel from Port Phillip Bay.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria  

The site has 1,001 species from Port Phillip Bay with more to come in 2012. There are frowning faces of stargazers to picture-perfect blue devils, fish that walk instead of swim, cannibalistic sea cucumbers, and seahorses that eat lunch like sucking a hotdog out of a roll. They're all part of our truly amazing local marine life.

The Port Phillip Taxonomic Toolkit is primarily an identification and information resource for scientists and marine enthusiasts, but the images provide some fun and education for all audiences. There are also interactive menus to identify selected species as well as descriptions of characters that make the animals unique.

The project is funded by the Department of Sustainability and Environment's Seagrass and Reefs Program for Port Phillip Bay and will be completed later this year.

Your Question: I am trying to trace my aunt and uncle and their children or any of their living relatives. They migrated to Australia after World War II in the 1940s or early 1950s. How would I go about finding them?

Locating living people is a question we often get and, although it can be very difficult, there are a number of resources that might help you to find them:

• For those that immigrated here in the mid 20th century, the first step would be to order their immigration records, which are held by the National Archives of Australia (NAA). This will give you information about their immigration and may give some indication of where they went when they arrived in Australia. These documents might then allow you to know where to search for further information in electoral rolls, public registries and other resources

The National Archives website has online indexes, which feature a percentage of records in their collection. A step by step guide to using these indexes and ordering documents can be found on our Quick guide to passenger lists infosheet.

Newly Arrived Migrant Family Standing Near Temporary Accommodation, Ringwood East, 1955
Image: unknown photographer
Source: Museum Victoria  

• Electoral rolls list all the names and addresses of registered voters within Australia. The State Library of Victoria Genealogy Centre holds archived as well as current electoral rolls dating from 1856 until the present. For more information about accessing electoral rolls contact the State Library of Victoria Genealogy Centre or the Victorian Electoral Commission.

• Copies of Birth Deaths and Marriages certificates may reveal useful personal information and allow you to trace your relative’s descendents. Births, deaths and marriage registries are run by different government departments in each state and some have a limited amount of information in online indexes.

• A simple search of the telephone directories may reveal the location of relatives. The White Pages is available online or you may wish to peruse hardcopies, which are often available at state, and sometimes local, libraries.

Man, Woman & Two Girls, Backyard, Ukrainian Christmas Day, Newport, 1951
Image: unknown photographer
Source: Museum Victoria  

• If your relatives belong to a specific migrant community, a relevant community organisation may be able to give you advice about finding them.

• Search digitised newspapers at the National Library of Australia’s Trove website for mentions of their name. With hundreds of national, state and local newspapers digitised from 1803 to 1954, you may find a mention of them.

• Their may be an online bulletin board for the ship your relative came on or a migrant camp in which they may have stayed. Many people find each other through such forums so it might be a great place to throw your question out to the wider world.

Mother, Boy & Girl Sitting on Public Seat, Middle Park, 1949
Image: Mr Cliff Atkinson
Source: Museum Victoria  

• Doing an online search for their names might reveal something. While it sounds obvious, many don’t think of it! Lots of people are online these days with personal websites, blogs, social networking, business websites and so forth.

• Various organisations have tracing services that may, in certain circumstances, be able to locate missing family members.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Post World War II Immigration in Photographs

Bec is working on the history of Museum Victoria's Science Collections and all the people who have been part of them since the museum's origin in 1854.

Last night, twenty extraordinary women were inducted into the Victorian Women's Honour Roll at a ceremony in Parliament House. I was lucky enough to be invited to witness Curator Emeritus Hope Black join this group.

Hope Macpherson receiving her award at the Victorian Women's Honour Roll ceremony on 6 March 2012.
Image: R. Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

Each year, the Honour Roll recognises and celebrates inspirational women across Victoria who, through their vision, leadership, commitment and hard work, have made an exceptional contribution to their communities or areas of expertise.

Minister for Women’s Affairs the Hon Mary Wooldridge opened the events with this quote: "If your dreams do not scare you they are not big enough." These women, without exception, had big dreams.

Hope says she wasn't sure what she wanted to do "but it had to be zoology". In 1937, then 18-year-old Hope Macpherson successfully applied for a job at the museum. Initially, her role was to make biology cases and dioramas. Driven to progress further, she studied science part-time at Melbourne University. Shortly after she graduated in 1946, was promoted to Curator of Shells and, simultaneously, the museum's first female curator.

Hope Macpherson identifying shells at the National Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, 1948 (MM 118931).
Source: Museum Victoria  

Her fieldwork as curator took her to remote parts of the Australian coast and she was part of the first group of female scientists permitted to research in the sub-Antarctic.

Hope also led ground-breaking surveys of Port Phillip Bay from 1957-1963. That data is still used today by environmental scientists, managers and planners, providing a benchmark against which to monitor change.

Hope Macpherson and Dan Lynch sorting material on the jetty at yjr Quarantine Station, Port Phillip Survey, Victoria, 1959 (MM 118931).
Source: Museum Victoria  

In addition to her scientific pursuits, Hope also pioneered specialist education programs by establishing a biology course for blind children held at the museum, using collection material.

Hope was required to resign from the Public Service when she married in 1965, as married women were excluded from employment in the service at that time. The forced change did not quell her drive. She retrained as a science teacher, passing on her passion for science to girls for 13 years.

Photograph that captures Hope Macpherson mid-air while running, Wilsons Promontory, Victoria, 1950. (MM 118929)
Image: Charles Brazenor
Source: Museum Victoria  

I have been privileged to work with Hope over the past couple of years, recording her history and acquiring personal working papers and images for the museum collection. After hearing her story and that of the other inductees I can only hope to be as fearless.

Links:

Victorian Women's Honour Roll

Hope Black nee Macpherson, Curator of Molluscs (1919 - )

Lisa works in the Public Programs Department at Melbourne Museum but also volunteers in the Palaeontology Department and has been on several fossil digs.

By the tenth day of the annual Dinosaur Dreaming dig we had already catalogued more than 140 fossils. To know where to dig in the first place we need to understand the geology of the area because the types of rock and how they have been laid down can give us much information about the palaeoenvironment. Dr Alan Tait, Adjunct Research Fellow in the Department of Geosciences at Monash University is currently researching the sedimentology of the Flatrocks site and kindly explained its geology to me.

Today the site known as Flatrocks is a rocky beach dominated by light grey sandstone but 120 million years ago during the Cretaceous, the environment was very different. Australia was once part of a supercontinent called Gondwana which also comprised Antarctica, South America, Africa, New Zealand and India.

Much of Gondwana had broken up by the Cretaceous and a rift had started to form between Australia and Antarctic. The types of rocks and fossils we find along the coastline in Inverloch today tell us the story of the rift valley and the animals and plants that lived there.

The cliff face near the Flatrocks site. The grey mudstone is the remains of a flood plain which was on the floor of the rift valley. The layer where we find most of our fossils lies above this and at the top is massive sandstone. To the left of the mudstone you can see a fault where the rock layers have shifted dramatically from their original horizontal deposition.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria

The fossil layer itself consists of the sedimentary rocks, grey sandstone and conglomerate that were deposited during flooding of the rift valley. The conglomerate pebbles are made of clay eroded from the flood plain soils during flooding. The sandstone is grey because it contains grains of volcanic rock eroded from active volcanos some distance away and washed into the rift valley. The sediments also include the fossilised remains of dead animals, plants and trees. The time between the floods was long enough for large trees to grow, perhaps at least 100 years, and the floods were catastrophic.

“The main fossil bearing layer (under the red line) consists of grey sandstone with coal throughout it. The layer is bounded by a layer of mudstone below and massive sandstone above.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria

There are many fossilised tree stumps on the shore platform. Some of these trees lie horizontally with their fossilised roots still attached and are believed to have been knocked over by the force of the floods and washed down the river. We also find fossil leaves of ferns, gingkoes and monkey puzzle-like trees that once grew as part of a forest within the rift valley.

A fossil tree trunk. If you look closely you can even see the growth rings.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

The coal in the fossil layer is the remains of decomposing plants that once grew in the valley. Fossilised grains of pollen from these plants have also been found and by identifying their species, we can date the sediments surrounding them.

A nearby dyke (a long straight crack in the rocks through which magma from deep below the Earth's crust travels upwards and cools) is made up of basaltic rock, another igneous rock type. The dyke is 99.5 million years old and cuts through the grey sandstone, meaning it formed after the sedimentary rocks had been deposited. 

Dale Nelson stands upon the basaltic dyke near the Flatrocks site.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

We also find minerals at the site, like pyrite and calcite.

Minerals found at the fossil dig site, shown with objects often found in geologists' pockets, for scale. Left: Pyrite crystals | Right: Calcite crystals
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Dinosaur Dreaming blog

Infosheet: Dinosaur Dreaming - the Inverloch fossil site

Video: Dinosaur Dreaming

Your Question: What exactly is the role of the Discovery Centre within Museum Victoria?

We play a very important role in making sure that you can access your state collection and this happens with requests made in person over the desk in the Discovery Centre, via the telephone, by snail mail and of course by email, and sometimes even by fax!

Visitors using the resources in the Discovery Centre
Image: Jo Philo
Source: Museum Victoria  

Every day when we come into the Discovery Centre we don’t know what the day will hold. Our inbox is jam packed with enquiries sent to us via our online enquiry form sent from many different people, with many different requests. The Discovery Centre is also responsible for responding to the various questions and comments that are posted on the different sections of the Museum Victoria website, the information sheets, the blog posts and the Collections Online webpages.

Visitors meeting Murray, the Murray Darling Carpet Python, in the Discovery Centre
Image: Jo Philo
Source: Museum Victoria  

We are responsible for handling and responding to your research based enquiries for access to Museum Victoria collections and experts. This could be anything from an identification request along the lines of 'what is this spider?' or 'what type of bird made this nest?', or I’d like to find out more about dinosaurs, or CSIRAC - we handle them all. We can also help you with accessing the collection; perhaps your grandfather donated a camera to the collection and you would like to see it. Well, we can help. And of course, we can help with the donation process if you have a significant item that you would like the museum to consider acquiring.

Jo and a visitor checking out the frogs in the Discovery Centre
Image: Kate Brereton
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Discovery Centre also assists academic researchers with access to the collection for study and learning. We can also help you with getting copies of images from the collection, maybe to add to a family album or your family history research. Of course, there are also the requests we receive from publishers for copyright requests, or other state museums for object loans and historical societies for conservation advice. 

If you would like to know more about the Discovery Centre Team, we are all blog authors so you can read a few lines about us, and of course see a happy snap too!

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Melbourne Museum Discovery Centre

Immigration Discovery Centre

Lisa works in the Public Programs Department at Melbourne Museum but also volunteers in the Palaeontology Department and has been on several fossil digs.

Last weekend hailed the beginning of the annual Dinosaur Dreaming dig season at Inverloch in Victoria. The crew will spend the next three weeks searching for the fossils of animals including dinosaurs, mammals, turtles, freshwater plesiosaurs, fish and pterosaurs that lived on and around the floodplain and in the forests that existed in the area 120 million years ago.

We can only access the dig site while the tide is out far enough to expose the shore platform, and before we can start hunting for fossils we need to prepare the site. First we remove the sand with shovels, which is often a bit of a smelly job due to the bits of rotting seaweed that have washed into the hole (the name we give to the part of the site which is being worked at any given time) with the tide.

Left: The crew removes sand, boulders and seaweed from on top of the rock layers. Right: John Wilkins and Dean Wright remove one of many large boulders from the dig site using a boulder extraction contraption John invented and built for us.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Next we use large chisels, crowbars and large drills to remove the overlying layer of sandstone. Once we have access to the fossil layer we can begin searching.

Some of the crew use large chisels and sledgehammers to remove large chunks of the fossil layer and the rest of the crew sit further up on the shore breaking these large rocks into walnut sized pieces in search of fossils.

Left: Travis Park uses a sledgehammer and chisel to remove a large chunk of fossil-bearing rock. Right: Gerry Kool uses a much smaller hammer and chisel to break down chunks of rock in search of fossils.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

While the main aim of the dig is to find fossils, there is much more we can learn about the site. Dean Wright, a surveyor, and Doris Seegats-Villiers, a PhD candidate at Monash University, used a Leica Total Station to collect data which will be used to map geological features such as the different rock layers and fault lines. Dean plans to overlay this data onto a 3D map of the site he made last year and this information will assist scientists to better understand the geology of the site.

Dean Wright and Doris Seegats-Villiers taking data points which Dean will use to create a geologic map of the Flatrocks site.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Some of the interesting bones we have found so far this season:

Left: A cross-section through a dinosaur limb bone. Right: A cross-section through a dinosaur toe bone.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Dinosaur Dreaming blog

Infosheet: Dinosaur Dreaming - the Inverloch fossil site

Video: Dinosaur Dreaming

Ursula Smith works in the natural sciences collections at Museum Victoria. Though a palaeontologist by training she finds all the collections fascinating and swings between excitement at all the cool stuff in them and despair at the lack of time to look at it all.

This cabinet contains parts of the skeleton of a fossil whale collected at Bells Beach, on the Surf Coast southwest of Melbourne.

Vertebrate Palaeontology Collection storage cabinet full of fossils.
Source: Museum Victoria  

This story is only indirectly about that whale, but it does start with one of its bones:

Fossilised whale bone.
Source: Museum Victoria  

This is a metacarpal – a bone from one of the whale's flippers (forelimbs). Here, it's being held by Dr Erich Fitzgerald, Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Harold Mitchell Fellow at Museum Victoria, which gives you an idea of the size – it's about 7cm long. The equivalent bone in a human hand (the bone that runs between your middle finger and your wrist) is about the same length, though not as chunky.

At the top of the bone, you can see two grooves that make an inverted 'V'. While they might not look particularly impressive, to Erich's eye that chevron shape was an immediate clue to something that's quite rare to find in the fossil record: it's a classic example of the marks left on bone by shark teeth. We know what a modern shark bite looks like from observing modern sharks and their prey, and the marks on this bone look just like the sorts of marks a modern shark bite makes. In the next photo, Erich is re-enacting the way a shark's tooth would make this sort of mark, (though obviously when a shark bites there are many more teeth involved).

Erich demonstrates how a shark tooth probably struck the whale bone.
Source: Museum Victoria  

While it's not absolutely conclusive evidence – this sort of palaeo-behaviour trace fossil rarely is – this, and other marks on other bones from the same specimen, is enough for us to be fairly certain that this whale was bitten by a shark. We also know that this happened very close to the whale's death because the bone shows no sign of healing. This tells us that either the whale was killed by the shark that attacked it or that the shark was scavenging the whale carcass after it died – we can't be sure which but we know that the whale wasn't bitten and then got away.

Even with this uncertainty, though, this is more information than palaeontologists usually have about interactions between animals in the fossil record. Information modern ecologists take for granted, such as who's eating who, is extremely rare to find for fossils. Bite marks like these are one of the few ways palaeontologists have any idea of how food webs may have been constructed way back when. But what's really cool about this particular whale/shark palaeo-interaction, is that rather than just being satisfied with 'this whale was attacked by a shark' we can actually figure out who the culprit was. A lot of work has been done on the geological unit that this specimen was collected from so we know what was sharing the waters with our luckless whale. Of the list of sharks known from the same unit, only one has teeth big enough to have made these marks:

Fossil shark tooth.
Source: Museum Victoria  

This tooth comes from the shark Carcharocles angustidens, known from relatively abundant fossils around the stretch of coast our whale was collected from. C. angustidens is a close relative of the rather more famous Carcharocles megalodon which has the largest teeth of any known shark, living or extinct (some are over 18cm long!) You can see the sharp little serrations along the edge of the tooth which would have effectively sawed into the bone of its victim, leaving the grooves we see in the whale's bones today.

So we think that somewhere in the Late Oligocene, 24-27 million years ago, in a sea that covered what is now part of Victoria, a shark, Carcharocles angustidens, bit a Mammalodon whale and perhaps even killed it. It's amazing what we can infer from just a few scratches on bone.

Links:

MV Blog: Evolving the biggest mouth in history

Footage of tiger sharks scavenging a whale carcass in Queensland

Footage of sharks eating a blue whale alive

"How fast can a mammal evolve from the size of a mouse to the size of an elephant?" This question introduces a new paper published today by a group of international researchers led by Alistair Evans of Monash University, including Dr Erich Fitzgerald, Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology at MV.

The world's largest mammal by weight, the Blue Whale, is about 61 million times heavier than the world's smallest, the Etruscan Shrew. Erich and his colleagues are interested in how such a range of body sizes evolved within the mammals, particularly the rate at which such evolution occurs.

Previous investigators have calculated rates of evolution using narrowly-defined parameters, whether within a shorter time scale or within a limited taxonomic group. This study is the first to tackle the larger picture, using data from a variety of species that lived over the last 70 million years.

The researchers found that it takes a minimum of 1.6 million generations for terrestrial mammals to increase their mass 100-fold. To increase by 5,000-fold, it takes at least 10 million generations.

In contrast, the researchers found that land mammals can decrease in size more than ten times faster than the time it takes to increase to the same degree. Hypothetically, it could take 5 million generations for a species to evolve from rabbit size to elephant size, whereas in just half a million generations it could shrink back down again if selective pressures directed it thus. Smaller body mass gives a competitive advantage under certain conditions; this phenomenon, known as insular dwarfism, is seen in the now-extinct dwarf elephants that were stranded on Mediterranean islands by rising sea levels.

Left: Children riding on Queenie, an Indian Elephant, at Melbourne Zoo in 1917 (MM 004061). Right: Rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus.
Image: Unknown | Alex J.
Source: Museum Victoria | Used under CC BY 2.0 from a_jo.  

Interestingly, aquatic mammals such as whales evolved large body mass much faster than land mammals, taking about half as many generations to achieve the same scale of increase.

Says Erich, "Whales can get bigger because the water supports their bodies and so their maximum size is not limited by gravity." He explains that a huge body can also be an advantage for aquatic mammals because it loses less heat.

"There doesn't seem to be any slowing-down in evolution of maximum body size in whales. Land mammals may have reached a plateau enforced by gravity, but it's conceivable that the Blue Whale is not the largest possible whale. Nevertheless, energetic demands of feeding a body larger than that of a blue whale may mean that, in reality, the blue whale is as large as animals get."

Large land-dwelling mammals have a variety of solutions to the problem of gravity, explains Erich. "Some of the changes we see are extreme thickening of bones, changes in locomotion and major changes to organ systems." A gigantic rabbit wouldn't just be a large version of today's feral bunny; in fact, it would probably be unrecognisable as a rabbit. Fossils of an extinct giant rabbit described in 2011 show that it had a stiff spine to support its bulk, which meant it would not have been able to hop. Accordingly, we might need to rethink the way we portray the Easter Bunny.

Links:

Evans, A.R. et al. The maximum rate of mammal evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published ahead of print on January 30, 2012.

Speed limits on the evolution of enormousness (Wired Science)

Science reveals the secrets of super-sized mammals (The Age)

Dr Erich Fitzgerald

Golden moles are burrowing mammals native to southern Africa that are completely blind. Yet, their fur produces "a rainbow of colours when viewed from various angles, much like the surface of a compact disc," according to Dr Kevin Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals. This raises the question: why would an animal that lives in the dark, and can't see anyway, be brightly coloured? Kevin and his colleagues, including MV Research Associate Dr Karen Rowe, have published a new study in Biology Letters that considers the implications of how and why iridescence evolved.

Golden mole specimen from the Museum Victoria collection.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Many insects, reptiles and birds use iridescence to attract mates, but this depends on keen eyesight on the part of the viewer. Analysis under scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy showed that the golden mole's colourful sheen is produced by the same mechanism as other animals: microscopic surface structures that refract light. The minute layers of scales on the surface of each hair are "most likely to reduce drag and damage while the moles swim through sand and soil," explains Karen. "The colours they produce are merely a by-product."

Hairs from these four golden mole specimens were analysed with scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy in this study.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The only other known example of mammal iridescence is the 'eye shine' seen when torchlight reflects from the retina of nocturnal animals, a useful trick for spotting animals in trees. With more investigation, the researchers may find other species with true iridescence and thus piece together the story of its evolution.

Links:

Holly K. Snyder, Rafael Maia, Liliana D'Alba, Allison J. Shultz, Karen M. C. Rowe, Kevin C. Rowe and Matthew D. Shawkey (2012) 'Iridescent colour production in hairs of blind golden moles (Chrysochloridae)' Biology Letters

World's first iridescent mammal discovered

Media release

Collection Manager David Staples has recently returned from a six-week voyage with a team of British scientists studying the marine life on seamounts and hydrothermal vents in the southern Indian Ocean.

Hydrothermal vents are associated with active spreading centres of tectonic plate boundaries and are often referred to as black (or white) smokers because of the mineral-rich, super-heated fluids they spew into the water column.

A diverse and unique fauna lives in association with the vents and a short clip of what was seen on one of these vents at about 3km depth can be viewed here. Yeti crabs, sea spiders, scaly-foot gastropods, mussels, worms and shrimp can be seen moving quickly at the periphery of these high temperature plumes.

Video used with the kind permission of Dr Jon Copley, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.

Links:

Mountain life beneath the sea

Black smoker in Dynamic Earth

Karen Rowe is a Research Associate at MV where she studies evolutionary ecology and behaviour in birds and mammals.

January 20th is an auspicious day for birding enthusiasts, marking Penguin Awareness Day. With 17 species currently recognised, members of the family Spheniscidae (pronounced sfen-IS-kuh-dee) are found only within the southern hemisphere. While most of us think of penguins as cold-adapted animals, surviving long treks over ice to breed and raise their young in the middle of winter, many species live further north, among the islands off of Antarctica, along the coasts of New Zealand and Australia, and one species is found on the Galapagos Islands (the aptly named Galapagos Penguin).

Royal Penguins (Eudyptes schlegeli) – among Elephant Seals on Macquarie Island.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

As a group, penguins possess an amazing array of adaptations, uniquely suited to their predominately marine existence. Unlike other birds, penguins have solid, rather than air-filled bones, to help them dive in the water. They have highly modified feathers that form a thick insulating layer that cover the body, rather than growing in the well-defined feather tract found in other birds. They also have unique eyes that allow them to see clearly both on land and in the sea. And while their short legs and feet make them seem awkward on land, many species actually travel tremendous distances over land and rocks to reach their breeding sites – some even traveling as far as three kilometres from water.

Captive Magellanic Penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus) floating in the water. The coloured flipper band allows zoo keepers to distinguish between individuals.
Image: Erich Fitzgerald
Source: Museum Victoria  

Extant species show a wide range of body sizes, from our own Little (or Fairy) Penguins, weighing 1.1 kg and standing 40 cm tall, to the largest species, the Emperor Penguin, at a whopping 30 kg and up to 115 cm tall.

Little Penguins (Eudyptyla minor) in captivity. These coloured leg bands are another way to tell individuals apart.
Image: Erich Fitzgerald
Source: Museum Victoria  

But even the Emperor Penguin is dwarfed in size by some of the extinct fossil penguins, including a 15-million-year-old giant penguin (Anthropodyptes gilli) from Victoria that may have approached twice its size. Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology, Dr. Erich Fitzgerald studies fossil penguins here at Museum Victoria. "Victoria was home to a remarkable diversity of penguins over the last 20 million years," says Dr. Fitzgerald. "The tiny Little Penguin living in Australia today is an oddity on a geologic timescale. The fossil record tells us that most penguins that have lived in Australia were large to huge in size and that at any one time there were perhaps two or more species coexisting here." Currently, Dr. Fitzgerald and his student, Travis Park, are working on six-million-year-old fossil penguins found in Melbourne on the shores of Port Philip Bay that are thought to be the size of the living Gentoo and Emperor Penguins.

The upper wing bone (humerus) of living penguins compared with their fossil counterparts from Victoria. From left to right: the 18-million-year-old fossil Anthropodyptes gilli; the living emperor penguin Aptenodytes forsteri; the living fairy penguin Eudyptula minor; the living gentoo penguin Pygoscelis papua; and the 6-million-year-old fossil Pseudaptenodytes. Credit: Photograph by Erich Fitzgerald
Image: Erich Fitzgerald
Source: Museum Victoria  

Emperor Penguin and chick, Antarctica.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

The unique ecology of penguins makes them particularly susceptible to a variety of human-induced threats. In particular, commercial fishing, often leading to death through by-catch or competition for prey items (which include fish, crustaceans, and cephalopods), directly impacts their survival. Penguins are also dependent on breeding grounds close to the shore and habitat loss is a major source of population declines. Smaller and fewer breeding grounds also promotes disease, as most species of penguins breed in large colonies.

Royal Penguin colony. This species is endemic to Macquarie Island and this is the largest Royal Penguin colony with over 180,000 breeding pairs. The fluffy young penguin in the front on the right is in moult.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

Although little research has been done looking at the impact of climate change on penguins, their specialised lifestyle suggests that climate change could have dramatic impacts on their distribution and abundance. "Penguins are an ancient group of birds, with a history stretching back some 65 million years to the extinction of the dinosaurs," says Dr. Fitzgerald. "In southern Australia they have persisted through the last 20 million years of major climatic changes, but it is unknown how they will respond to the current human-exacerbated wave of environmental upheaval. It would be a terrible shame to see this ancient and superbly successful group of birds become threatened with extinction within our lifetime."

Adelie Penguin, Bechervaise Island, Antarctica.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

Links:

Emperor Penguins in the Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world

Penguins on Atlas of Living Australia

Happy Feet Two at IMAX Melbourne

Dr Joanne Taylor has had a busy few months; just before Christmas the book that she co-edited was published, and now she has been selected as a 2012 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) Rubenstein Fellow!

This prestigious fellowship is awarded by the Smithsonian Institution to support scientists to upload information about the species they study into the EOL. As a Rubenstein Fellow, Jo will be adding over 400 species of squat lobsters to this amazing resource about the world's biodiversity.

In 2009, Jo started a postdoctorate project to produce the first comprehensive book about this group of colourful crustaceans. The resulting book, The Biology of Squat Lobsters, was published by CSIRO last year.

Dr Jo Taylor in late 2011 with her hot-off-the-press preview copy of her book, The Biology of Squat Lobsters.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Congratulations Jo!

Links:

MV News: New squat lobster species

MV News: Butterflies of the sea

Encyclopedia of Life

The Biology of Squat Lobsters, edited by Gary C B Poore, Shane T Ahyong and Joanne Taylor. CSIRO Publishing, 2011.

In October 2011, 50 scientists and volunteers performed a rapid biodiversity survey of Wilsons Promontory in partnership with Parks Victoria. In this video, Dr Karen Rowe and Dr Karen Roberts talk about the mammals of Wilsons Prom, particularly the small mammals: native rats and antechinus.

 

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Prom Bioscan

Paradise Valley

Historian at the Prom

Hunting for herpetiles

Crayfish climbing trees

Kevin is the Senior Curator of Mammals at Museum Victoria. He reports on his recent expedition to the mountains of Sulawesi, Indonesia in this series of blog posts.

Last Sunday was the birthday of Alfred Russel Wallace who, along with Darwin, co-founded the theory of natural selection. As Ursula reported, Wallace's expedition through the Malay Archipelago (modern-day Indonesia) also prompted him to develop the field of biogeography and to define the zoogeographical regions of our planet; that is, where groups of animals are found and why.

Wikimedia Commons. " title="Click here to view larger image."> Wallace's world map showing the zoogeographical regions in different colours.
Image: A.R. Wallace
Source: Copyright expired. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons.  

Biogeography proposes that the species native to a particular region are determined by geographic processes such as vicariance (isolation) and dispersal (colonisation). Natural selection then drives species to evolve traits suited to survival and reproduction in their environments available in their geographic context. Biogeography and natural selection combined often result in species from different regions converging on similar morphological solutions to similar selective pressures.

Consider the mammals of Australia, which are the product of millions of years of natural selection acting on a set of species determined by biogeography. Australia, along with New Guinea, comprises the continental shelf of Sahul that today, as well as in Wallace's time, is separated by the Indonesian archipelago from the Asian continental shelf, Sunda. During low sea levels of the Pleistocene (the last 2 million years), Australia, New Guinea, and adjacent islands were one continuous landmass as were Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, and Borneo on the Asian side. Between them was Sulawesi, the Moluccan islands and the Lesser Sunda islands (Nusa Tenggara) all separated by deep ocean channels. This region at the interchange between Asia and Australia is referred to as Wallacea.

Map of Sunda and Sahul and the Wallace Line, the Lydekker Line and the Weber Line.
Image: Maximilian Dörrbecker
Source: Used under CC BY-SA 3.0 from Wikimedia Commons.  

85 million years ago Australia was connected to Antarctica and via Antarctica to South America. When a meteorite crashed into the Yucatan peninsula of North America 65 million years ago annihilating the dinosaurs (except a few feathered and crocodilian ones), Australia was already starting to drift away from Antarctica. For 40 million years Australia drifted in isolation and only about 10 million years ago began to collide with Asia. The mammals that made this journey survive today as the marsupials and monotremes that are unique to Australia and New Guinea. The marsupials have evolved to fill many ecological roles with adaptations similar to placental mammals on other continents, a process driven by natural selection leading to convergent evolution.

An example of convergent evolution. The Thylacine (left) and the Red Wolf (right) occupy similar roles in the ecosystem and have similar dog-like characteristics, even though they belong to entirely different groups of animals.
Image: Left: Heath Warwick | Right: ucumari
Source: Left: Museum Victoria | Right: Used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 from ucumari.  

The native terrestrial mammals of Australia, however, are not just the result of isolation but are also descended from a select group of intrepid colonisers from Asia. These are the native bats and rats that account for nearly half of the mammal species of Australia. The rats are remarkable because they are the only non-flying, terrestrial mammals to colonize Australia before humans and they did it twice; once 5 million years ago (Rowe et al, 2008) and again 1 million years ago (Rowe et al, 2011). Both colonisers clearly came from Asian sources but the details of how they crossed multiple ocean channels and archipelagos are still unclear. In part this is hindered by our limited understanding of rat diversity from Wallacea, a condition that I and my colleagues endeavor to correct with our recent expeditions to Sulawesi.

Links:

More on convergent evolution of marsupial and placental mammmals

A beautiful cloak woven from flax and kiwi feathers might seem like an unusual piece of sports memorabilia, but in 1889 this is exactly what the museum acquired from the visiting New Zealand Native rugby team. This team toured Australia, New Zealand and the British Isles as a money-making venture at the height of international fascination in the exotic colonies, giving the world their first glimpse of New Zealand's now-renowned rugby talent.

ANU scholar Keren Ruki recently completed a one-month internship in MV's Indigenous Cultures department examining and researching the cloak and other collection objects from New Zealand. The cloak is exquisitely made and in beautiful condition but was largely undocumented. Keren's research means we now know much more about the cloak and its story.

Keren Ruki with the kiwi feather cloak housed for more than a century in Museum Victoria's collection.
Image: Rod Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Keren first visited Museum Victoria several years ago when she was researching Māori cloak construction for her own art practice. Born in New Zealand but raised in Australia, Keren describes feeling somewhere between the two cultures and drawn to the weaving techniques of her ancestors. "I felt a big urge to go home to find out who I was," she says, explaining her trips back to New Zealand to learn how to weave. Some weaving techniques have been lost in time but keen detective work helps to recover them and keep them alive. "Cloaks in collections teach me how things are made. If you've got an object, it's never dead. You can relearn how to make it."

Now embarking upon a master's degree in liberal arts, an 1854 Student Scholarship helped bring her back to Melbourne for a closer look at this cloak in particular. It was woven top to bottom using an off-loom weaving technique that is unique to Māori weavers called whatu. In a laborious process, the maker(s) used mussel shells to extract fibre from the native flax plants, drew the fibre out into string, and wove the string across the warp, locking each kiwi feather in place. It would have been highly prized when it was made and thus chosen to accompany the New Zealand Native team on their tour.

This kiwi feather cloak was purchased by the museum in June 1889.
Image: Rod Start
Source: Museum Victoria.  

The 1888-1889 rugby tour was a triumph for the New Zealanders. They won 78 of their 107 games. As Keren puts it, "They took the game back to the masters and flogged them at it. The rugby field was one of those places where we could have a fair go. It was a great equaliser in a sense, even though it was a colonial game." The players wore black shirts with a fern motif, later adopted as the national team colours and still used today. It was also the first time that the haka was performed at the rugby, perhaps even while wearing this cloak.

The tour coincided with the Great Exhibition movement when the world was hungry for objects from faraway places. "Cloaks and the Māori were such a novelty, that's why the team came here – there was a market for them," explains Keren. However the tour was not as lucrative as the captain and organiser Joseph Warbrick had hoped. It was expensive to feed and transport 26 players and there were injuries due to the gruelling schedule of games. Cultural items were sold off to museums as the team returned to New Zealand. This cloak was bought by the (then) National Museum of Victoria on 10 June 1889, the day before the New Zealand Natives slaughtered the Victorian team in a rugby match. Another cloak was purchased by the Australian Museum.

1888-1889 New Zealand Natives football team before playing Queensland in July 1889.
Source: In the public doman, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.  

Keren's research is not complete; she's still hoping to uncover the whakapapa or ancestry of the cloak – who made it and where it came from. "It's from the Ngati Kahungunu tribe from the Kaimanawa Ranges in the North Island. There might be other ways to follow the threads of cloak through cloaks in other collections. The maker might be a Warbrick relative."

It's wonderful to hear that she will continue seeking the stories behind the Māori treasures in Australian Museums. "To have a look at my own cultural material is really important and it's very significant to the Māori community in Australia. It's been an amazing journey for me because everyone's opened up their doors."

This year's round of 1854 Student Scholarships is open for applications until 31 March 2012.

Links:

Pacific Island Ethnographic Collection

Kevin is the Senior Curator of Mammals at Museum Victoria. He reports on his recent expedition to the mountains of Sulawesi, Indonesia in this series of blog posts.

I recently returned from an expedition into the heart of Sulawesi's central mountain forests. Shrouded in the cool moisture of clouds, these forests appear to be made of moss erupting from the ground. Halfway between Asia and Australia, the native species on this island are neither Australian nor Asian but a unique mix of lineages from the two great continents.

The mountain rainforest of Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Together with Anang S. Achmadi, Curator of Mammals from the Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense (the national museum of Indonesia) and a team of local guides, I hiked two days from the rice fields of Mamasa to a field camp at 2600 m in the mountains above.

The Sulawesi expedition team.
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Base camp for the Sulawesi expedition.
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Led by our local guides, including 84 year-old village-elder, Pak Daud, we encountered a pristine, primordial forest rich in biodiversity. Streams dissect the plateau spreading the daily afternoon showers across the landscape and to the fertile rice fields in the valleys below. The endangered mountain anoa (a pygmy water buffalo found only in the mountains of Sulawesi) run in large numbers, bear cuscus (relatives of Australia's brushtail possums) climb through the tree tops, dozens of orchid and pitcher plant species cling to the moss that covers everything, and a diverse assemblage of rodents survive in large numbers. We came in search of these rodents found nowhere else on earth, but which may help us understand the relationship between Australia's native rodents and Asia's.

Hiking through mountain terrain in Sulawesi.
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Over three weeks of surveys in these remote forests, we detected 34 species of small mammals (< 1 kg), a healthy number for any forest. Consider that there are about the same number of small mammals across the entire State of Victoria. The rodents in these mossy mountain forests are characterised by a range of morphological oddities, such as giant woolly rats, Eropeplus, small arboreal mice, Haeromys, spiny rats, Maxomys, tiny arboreal squirrels, Prosciurillus, large terrestrial squirrels, Hyosciurus, and a collection of shrew rats that, like shrews, specialise on eating invertebrates. These shrew rats include two species of the soft-furred Tateomys and one species of the short-legged Melasmothrix.

Rodents of Sulawesi. Left: small arboreal mouse Haeromys montanus. | Right: giant woolly rat Eropeplus canus
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Two species of shrew rats from Sulawesi. Left: Tateomys rhinogradoides | Right: Tateomys macocercus
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

We also detected two shrew rat genera that have not been seen since the 1970s including three individuals each of the puppy-faced Crunomys and the rare, worm-eating, gangly-legged Sommeromys, previously known from a single specimen.

Two general of shrew rats that were found for the first time since the 1970s. Above: Crunomys sp. | Below: Sommeromys sp.
Image: Kevin Rowe
Source: Museum Victoria  

Liza Dale-Hallett is a senior curator in the History and Technology Department. She is responsible for the Sustainable Futures Collection, which includes historical agricultural machinery.

Ken Porter, a former Transport Manager at agricultural machinery manufacturer Massey Ferguson, accidentally stumbled into heritage conservation when he rescued a wooden box from a dumpster in 1991. He thought the box might be some use to him at home, but noticed that a square of cardboard was nailed to it, reading: The plaster cast of H.V. McKay. Not to be opened until another one needed.

Ken Porter, Volunteer at Scienceworks, with the mysterious crate he rescued from a dumpster.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

For another five years Ken secretly rescued nearly 100 years of history of the McKay manufacturing enterprise. This 'rubbish' was squirreled away and subsequently offered to Museum Victoria where it now forms one of Australia's most significant industrial heritage collections.

'No one thinks of history. Until I found that box I didn't either. It takes a quirk of fate that keeps these things,' recalls Ken, now an Honorary Associate of Museum Victoria. Since 1996, Ken and 20 other ex-employees (with many more from around Australia) have been busy identifying and documenting the collection of 15,000 images, over 700 films, numerous objects, and over 5,000 trade publications.

Left: Portrait of Hugh Victor McKay. 1912. | Right: Seedtime and Harvest Shall Never Cease: H. V. McKay, General Implement Catalogue, Sunshine Harvester Works
Source: Museum Victoria  

From humble beginnings, H.V. McKay created the largest industrial enterprise in the southern hemisphere. His equipment was widely used on farms across Australia and was exported to over 150 countries. Following McKay's death, his legacy to Australian agriculture continued through McKay Massey Harris, and later Massey Ferguson (Australia). In 1986, after a period of over 80 years of manufacturing in Sunshine, the company ceased production. This period of major change also included a significant 'clean up' of old company records, which is when Ken's rescue efforts began.

After so many years documenting the McKay Collection, the crate remained a mystery waiting to be revealed. What was inside? How could we open it without damaging the contents?

Michael Varcoe-Cocks, Conservator of Paintings at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), volunteered his expertise in radiography to help examine the construction and content of the crate before it was opened. Radiography reveals physical features not otherwise visible to the naked eye. It is often employed to better understand the condition and method of manufacture of a work of art, and doesn't harm the object.

Examining the x-ray films at NGV.
Image: Justin Schooneman
Source: NGV  

The x-ray was performed in the NGV's Technical Examination Room. Michael enclosed the crate in lead then passed a beam of x-rays through it. Film sensitive to x-rays recorded an image of the crate, inside and out, which provided useful information for MV Conservator Karen Fisher about how to open the crate. Karen used a Japanese Cat's Paw (mini crow bar) to gently lift the rear panels; inside were two profile reliefs of H.V. McKay, both in plaster, not a 'bust' as indicated on the outside of the crate.

MV Conservator Karen Fisher opening the crate with a Japanese Cat's Paw.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

The two profile reliefs of H.V. McKay.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Karen then turned to the letter secured by drawing pins to the front of the crate. She used humidification and a heated spatula to make the paper more flexible and break the seal. The letter confirmed that Wallace Anderson was the sculptor commissioned to create the relief profiles. Anderson worked as an artist for the Australian War Museum, the Australian War Memorial and as an independent sculptor. Anderson's most famous works are 'Simpson and his Donkey' (1935), and busts of nine former Australian prime ministers located in the Ballarat Botanic Gardens (1939-45). He also created the bust of H.V. McKay now on display in The Melbourne Story.

We still don't know why the profiles were created or whose initials are represented on the lower edge of one of the plaster moulds... but after 20 years, the crate's contents are finally free.

Links:

H.V. McKay Sunshine Collection

Lisa works in the Public Programs Department at Melbourne Museum but also volunteers in the Palaeontology Department and has been on several fossil digs.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to go on a dinosaur dig? Recently I went on a fossil-hunting adventure with a crew of 12 Museum Victoria staff and volunteers at a site called Eric the Red West in Cape Otway National Park.

120 million years ago this part of Australia was a river valley surrounded by forest. When the valley flooded, the remains of dinosaurs, small mammals, pterosaurs and forest plants (which became the coal that we see in the rock) were washed into the river. Eventually some of these bones, as well as those of animals such as fish and turtles that were living in the river, became covered by sand and mud. Over time the sediment became the grey sandstone that is exposed on beach today.

The crew heads down to the site.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

When we first arrived on site we unloaded all of our gear and took it down onto the beach. Before we started any digging we prospected along the beach for fossils that were naturally exposed through weathering of the rock.

Left: Lesley Kool and Mary Walters in search of fossils weathering out of the rock. | Right: Part of a dinosaur limb bone.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Next it was time to bring out the heavier equipment to remove rock and search for fossils that were still buried. We used large rock saws, small electric saws, sledgehammers and chisels to remove large chunks of the fossil-bearing rock.

Travis removes sand from the rock with a shovel and Gerry removes chunks of rock with a sledge hammer and chisel.
Image: Liza Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Left: David Pickering uses a small electric saw to delicately remove a fossil. | Right: Dr Erich Fitzgerald uses a larger rock saw to not so delicately (but precisely) remove a fossil.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

When large chunks of rock have were removed and checked for fossils, the rest of the crew used smaller hammers and chisels to carefully break the rock down to sugar-cube sized pieces in search of tiny fossils.

Left: David Pickering uses a hand lens to inspect a newly exposed fossil. | Right: Astrid patiently chisels away at rock in search of delicate fossils.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

And we were well rewarded for our efforts:

Dr Erich Fitzgerald points to a fossil fish jaw he has just discovered in the rock.
Image: Lisa Nink
Source: Museum Victoria  

Despite the rain and cold it was a wonderful experience. My friends and colleagues often ask me, 'doesn't it get boring breaking rocks on a beach all day?' but it never does. You never know when the next strike of your hammer and chisel may reveal a new fossil that hasn't seen the light of day for 120 million years. You never know, it may even be a completely new species.

You can see some of the fossils that have been found along Victoria's coastline in 600 Million Years: Victoria evolves at Melbourne Museum.

Links:

Dinosaur Dreaming Blog

MV Blog: Dinosaur Dreaming Dig

Infosheet: Inverloch fossil site

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

There was a flurry of excitement among our moth team over the diversity of moths and some exciting new records for the region and state. Members of the Entomological Society of Victoria, Marilyn and Dean Hewish, Grace Lewis, Ken Harris and Josh Grub, set up night light stations with bright mercury vapour lamps in front a large white sheet. They run all night, as different groups of moths arrive at different times of the night. They clocked up over 120 moth species.

Left:Sceliodes cordalis | Right: A perfectly camouflagued Convolvulus Hawk Moth, Agrius convolvuli.
Image: M. Hewish
Source: M. Hewish  

There are several theories on why moths come to human light sources. The generally accepted theory is that moths use points of light in the night sky (such as the moon) to orient their flight paths. They keep the brightest light at a particular angle to their flight direction in order to fly straight. As they go past our electric lights they keep turning inwards to maintain the correct angle until they spiral into the porch light or the light station sheets.

The arriving moths came in all shapes and sizes. Two of the weirdest were the Twisted Moth and the plume moths. The Twisted Moth contorts its body as part of its camouflage to look very not-moth-like. The plume moths have long narrow wings with the rear pair hidden under the front pair. They get their name from the feathery tips to their wings.

Above: Twisted Moth, Circopetes obtusata looks just like a dry eucalyptus leaf. | Below: A plume moth, Stenoptilia zophodactylus
Image: M. Hewish
Source: M. Hewish  

Colour patterns ranged from the excellent camouflage of the hawk moths that perfectly match the grey tree bark to brightly coloured forms including some with false eye spots, known as ocelli.

Two brightly-coloured Neds Corner moths. Left: Pale Spotted Tiger Moth, Amata aperta | Right: Grammodes ocellata with beautiful eye-spots, or ocelli.
Image: M. Hewish | D. Hewish
Source: M. Hewish | D. Hewish  

The wood moths (family Cossidae) caused the most excitement. These beautiful moths are not particularly common and the three species found included two ornately-patterned species and a third smaller species that is a new record for Victoria. The males of these moths (and many other moth groups) can be recognised by their large feather-like antennae. These are the chemosensory organs of the males, used to 'smell' the pheromones released by the females. By contrast, females have much narrower, less-feathery antennae.

Two wood moths. Left: Endoxyla sp. | Right: Endoxyla neuroxantha representing a new Victorian record for this species.
Image: M.Hewish
Source: M. Hewish  

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

One of the priority groups of animals for the Bush Blitz surveys is the primitive mygalomorph spiders, such as trapdoor spiders and tarantulas. This group of spiders have large fangs that point down and can only be used to pin and pierce their prey. The 'modern' spiders (araneomorphs) have fangs that turn towards each other, so can be used more easily to grab their prey. We found only one small mygalomorph spider species.

Mygalomorph spider
Image: M Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Wolf spiders are the other focus group for these surveys and we found them everywhere. Dr Barbara Baehr from Queensland Museum was the wolf spider expert on the team. On night walks the blue eye shine of hundreds of wolf spiders can be seen over the ground and in the trees. Some larger ones build trapdoors over their burrow, complete with a perfect hinged lid.

Left: Wolf spider | Right: Wolf spider burrow with trapdoor
Image: Patrick Honan | Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The huntsman spiders here were very impressive, being among the largest in Australia with the females reaching 20cm across. Close-up images showed that many had small red mites crawling over their bodies.

Huntsman spider
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

A Redback Spider nest was found by BHP participant Paul Simper where a large female was guarding two round egg masses while the tiny attendant male sat nearby.

A Redback Spider family - the large female is in the centre, with the small male to the left and an egg sac to the right.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

The list of other spider types at Neds Corner is long, and includes ant spiders, ant-mimicking spiders, jumping spiders, orb weavers, social spiders, crab spiders and cellar spiders.

Ant spider (family Zodariidae).
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Links:

Parks Australia blog

Bush Blitz

Neds Corner Station

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

The range of invertebrate animals that we found at Neds Corner was spectacular. At the robust end of the scale were the Rasping Crickets with their big jaws and impressive biting powers. We encountered pairs of these large crickets, the females having the long egg-laying ovipositor off the tip of their tail.

Rasping Cricket
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

We also found the delicate pottery brood chambers built by potter wasps. They build these perfect small chambers to contain their young and then bring food to the developing grubs.

Above: Adult potter wasp | Below: The nest of the potter wasp.
Image: Patrick Honan | Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Grace Lewis from the Entomological Society of Victoria witnessed the life and death tug-of-war between a spider wasp and meat ants over a paralysed wolf spider. The ants won.

Above: Antlion larva in its conical pit | Below: Winged antlion adult
Image: David Paul | Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The ants were not so lucky in the many antlion pits we found scattered in the red sand. Antlions are the juvenile stage of an insect related to the lacewings (order Neuroptera). The young antlions with their big jaws dig a conical pit in the sand and sit in the bottom waiting for ants to slide in. The flying adults were attracted to our night lights. We also saw another related insect known as a mantis fly or mantispid – it has a lacewing body with the attacking front end of a praying mantis.

Mantispid or mantis fly
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The centipedes were beautiful and fast, with lots of legs for running. We also found small red-eyed cicadas everywhere and saw them emerge from their wingless cases.

Colourful centipede
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dr John Stanisic of the Queensland Museum was pleased with his tally of ten land snail species including some of the smallest animals imaginable. Our photographer David Paul has perfected photographing "gliding sand grains".

Tiny land snail
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Every day we found more radical colours, shapes and sizes amongst the invertebrate fauna than the day before.

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Links:

Parks Australia blog

Bush Blitz

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

By 25 November, rain drenched Neds Corner and the clay turned to slippery mud. Great weather for frogs. With the rain's arrival, frogs emerged from the mud as our vehicles sank into it.

Rain at Ned's Corner. Left: The view from the homestead porch | Right: Boggy road
Image: M. Hewish / M. Cheng
Source: M. Hewish / M. Cheng  

Pobblebonk frogs turned up everywhere. In our pitfall trap lines, 30 pits contained 37 frogs. These frogs bury into the soil in the dry weather and wait for the rains. Then they emerge to feed and mate.

Pobblebonk Frog (Limnodynastes dumerili) at Neds Corner.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

The other frogs we encountered were the Spadefoot, Spotted and Barking Marsh Frogs, Peron's Tree Frog and a froglet (genus Crinia). The tree frogs can be recognised by their padded toes, good for climbing.

Peron's Tree Frog (Litoria peroni) with beautiful green spots.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

The wetter weather was also good for the fungi and Dr Teresa Lebel from the National Herbarium of Victoria found many new records for this region. In arid country many types of fungus rest under the soil in a shrivelled state. As soon as the water reaches them, their stalks hydrate and the heads of species like puffball fungi emerge above the mud to release their spores.

Fungi after rain at Ned's Corner. Left: Fruiting bodies of the Earth Star fungus | Right: Tinder Conch fungus
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

One of the fungus highlights was finding fallen white shelf fungi at the bases of big River Red Gums. The spongy dead fungus is called Tinder Conch fungus as Aboriginal peoples used it for carrying the slow-burning coals needed for fire starting.

Our survey team was not as well-adapted as the frogs and managed to bog three cars in one day, but a combination of winches and effort got us all home safe and sound.

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Links:

Parks Australia blog

Bush Blitz

Frogs of Victoria infosheet series

Royal Botanical Gardens Fungimap

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

With the warm weather we experienced at the start of the survey, the Neds Corner Bush Blitz team clocked up an impressive tally of reptile species. Being in the driest corner of Victoria, the desert influence is obvious in a wonderful range of skinks, dragons, geckoes and snakes.

Four of the larger lizards have been found. The Inland Bearded Dragon has the scales and scutes of the best fictional dragons and has been found sunning itself on dead logs and fence posts. From above these spikes help them blend against the background. The Shingleback with its bright blue tongue has been observed many times living up to its other name (Sleepy Lizard) by sleeping or slowly loping on the roadsides. They are often in pairs. This species mates for life and can live to up to 50 years old. Sand goannas and a large Lace Monitor have also been recorded.

Shingleback Skink
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Five gecko species (Bynoe's, Thick-tailed, Tree Dtella, Tassellated and Marbled) have already been found through night walks or searching under bark and through leaf litter. They are a mix of ground dwellers (with normal claws) and tree-climbers with their fat fleshy toes. Many gecko species store fat in their tails and our ones seem well fed. We've been finding some very pregnant females bulging with the two eggs they lay at a time.

Thick-tailed Gecko
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

In addition to the Shingleback, five other skink species have been found including Tree Skink, Boulanger's Skink, Carneby's Wall Skink and several yet-to-be resolved Ctenotus species.

Boulanger's Skink
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The snake highlight has been a Curl Snake, a small species around 30 cm long. It was found while researchers Patrick Honan and Chloe Miller were searching at night for tiger beetles on clay pans. Though small, this species is highly venomous and has caused human fatalities so we handled it very carefully. It is listed as threatened in Victoria under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act.

Curl Snake
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Links:

Parks Australia blog

Bush Blitz

Mark is Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria. He's reporting back from Neds Corner in this series of blog posts.

Researchers from the museum's Sciences and Live Exhibits departments have gathered in the far north-west corner of Victoria to survey the wildlife of Neds Corner Station on the state's desert fringe. The Neds Corner survey is part of the Bush Blitz program, a biodiversity discovery partnership between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia. It aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. The 30,000 hectare reserve is managed by the Trust for Nature, an independent not-for-profit organisation that purchases and permanently protects properties to conserve nature.

Saltbush at Ned's Corner
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The survey encompasses animals, plants and fungi, so the museum team has joined scientists from the National Herbarium of Victoria, the Queensland Museum and the University of New South Wales. They have also been joined by five staff from BHP's Environmental Division around Australia, who will be aiding the researchers in the field and lab.

The Ned's Corner Bush Blitz team.
Source: Museum Victoria

The aim is to survey across the many arid fringe habitats found in the Neds Corner reserve including saltbush plains, mallee scrub, clay pans, sandy rises and amongst the River Red Gums and Black Box eucalypts that line the adjacent Murray River.

Habitats at Ned's Corner. Above: River Red Gum forest. Below: Black Box eucalypts.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

The survey runs from 21 November to 2 December and the museum team are using extensive visual and acoustic surveys, pitfall trap lines, small mammal traps, baited cage traps, bat sonic listening devices and moth light stations to census the wildlife.

Two types of traps in use at Ned's Corner. Above: small mammal trap Below: pitfall trap
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

Bush Blitz is a biodiversity partnership discovery program between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton and Earthwatch Australia, that aims to document the plants and animals across Australia's National Reserve System. Museum Victoria also participated in Bush Blitz at Lake Condah in March 2011.

Links:

Parks Australia blog

Bush Blitz

Following on from the student hand-in trifecta post, here are two more Masters projects recently completed by students working in the museum’s Natural Sciences Department. Both students performed genetic analysis on local lizard species.

Pete Smissen examined the geographic movement of the Lace Monitor (Varanus varius) over time. About 25,000-20,000 years ago, Australia experienced its Last Glacial Maximum, when the climate was colder and drier than it is currently.

Pete's fieldwork with Lace Monitors. Left: Weighing an animal in the field. Right: A Lace Monitor basking in a sunny tree.
Image: Peter Smissen
Source: Peter Smissen  

Analysing mitochondrial DNA (which is only passed down maternal lines), Pete found that there are three genetically distinct groups of Lace Monitors in Australia that have been evolving independently since the time of the Last Glacial Maximum. This suggests that the species persisted through these cold times in small refugia then dispersed broadly as temperatures increased. When he looked at fast-evolving nuclear DNA, (which is inherited from both parents), he found similar population clusters across Australia, but little genetic structure in a smaller geographic area in Gippsland. This lack of structure is a different pattern to that found in many other species, but is consistent with Lace Monitors being large, mobile, generalist animals.

Luisa Teasdale examined the variable colouration found in male Tawny Dragons (Ctenophorus decresii). Some males have vibrant orange patches on their throats while others are quite drab.

The four distinct throat colour morphs in Tawny Dragons.
Image: Luisa Teasdale
Source: Luisa Teasdale  

By analysing digital photographs for colour and pattern combined with genetic tecniques, she found evidence that there are four distinctly different morphs that seem to be genetically clustered. This suggests that even though there is one interbreeding population, the lizards breed preferentially with their own morph. Her work poses some interesting questions about how the four morphs differ in other respects, such as behaviour or life history, and what keeps them separate even within the same population.

Congratulations to Luisa and Pete for completing their fascinating projects!

Links:

Information for prospective students

Lizards of Victoria infosheet series

Roll over Drop Bears, there's a new, real threat in the trees of Wilsons Promontory - freshwater crayfish!

I reckon the best story from the recent Prom Bioscan for Parks Victoria is the discovery of freshwater crayfish climbing trees. Forget that a huge whale washed ashore nearby, forget the species found that had never been recorded from the area, and ignore all the hype around helicopters, it should be all about these partly arboreal crustaceans that are only known from the Prom.

Freshwater crayfish Engaeus australis at Wilsons Prom.
Image: Adnan Moussalli
Source: Museum Victoria  

Our freshwater ecologist Dr Richard Marchant was among the researchers to see the Engaeus crayfish on tree trunks and branches. He's worked around streams and rivers throughout Victoria for over 25 years and this is the first time he's seen this.

"It's a mystery why this mainly burrow-dwelling species would be in the trees when their food is on the ground. Clearly there's something new here that we didn't know about this Prom population. Unfortunately on this trip there wasn't time to find out more." said Richard.

"It has been only recently appreciated that from an evolutionary point of view insects are just 'flying crustaceans'. While tree-climbing crayfish suggest a hankering for an aerial existence among crustaceans there is no evidence that this is how they took to the skies and evolved wings!" said Dr. Gary Poore, another of the museum's crayfish experts, when he heard of the finding.

When I heard the story, my thoughts went immediately to the mythical Drop Bear - a furry clawed beast the size of a dog that, legend has it, lives in trees in Australia and drops down on people as they walk below. At only a finger-length long, perhaps 8cm or so, these little crustaceans wouldn't do much damage if they did drop on someone, but you still might be at risk of a nip from their tiny claws on your shoulder if they did.

Normally sticklers for poking around in rivers and digging burrows with mini mountains of mud as entrances, the aquatic Engaeus crayfish were seen in a remote area of the Prom off limits to the public, so rest assured – hikers and campers this summer will be safe.

Freshwater crayfish Engaeus australis at Wilsons Prom.
Image: Adnan Moussalli
Source: Museum Victoria  

The species in the trees was Engaeus australis and is only known to occur at Wilsons Prom. A few other Engaeus species also live at the Prom, but they also occur elsewhere in Victoria. Engaeus crayfish are related to yabbies (genus Cherax) and the larger Murray River and Spiny crayfishes (genus Euastacus). There are 22 Engaeus species that occur in several parts of Victoria, and about 10 other species of crayfish, together making Victoria one of the world's most diverse areas for freshwater crayfish.

Links:

Infosheet: Land crayfish

Engaeus australis on the IUCN Redlist

Australian Museum: Drop Bear

Congratulations to Katie Smith, Natalie Calder and Skipton Woolley for handing in their postgraduate theses in the last fortnight. All three have done major pieces of research that combined new field studies with Museum Victoria Natural Sciences collections.

For her PhD, Katie Smith assessed the hybrid zone between two closely-related south-eastern Australian tree frogs, Litoria ewingi and Litoria paraewingi. A hybrid zone is an area where the geographic distribution of two species overlap in a narrow contact zone. They subsequently share habitat and sometimes cross-breed.

Top: Litoria ewingi calling. Bottom: Litoria paraewingi. Can you spot the difference between these two species?
Image: Katie Smith | Fran Lyndon-Gee
Source: Museum Victoria  

In the 1960s, Murray Littlejohn first reported hybridisation in these species in the Kinglake area, collecting specimens and recordings of the male advertisement calls in the 1960s. Katie built upon Murray's work, performing genetic and acoustic analysis on the original specimens and recordings and recent samples to compare the hybrid zone then and now. Says Katie, "it makes you realise what a good job Murray did! It's amazing that he even worked out they are different species because their appearance and calls are so similar."

Main: Murray Littlejohn recording frog calls in the 1960s. Inset: Katie Smith recording frog calls for her PhD.
Source: Murray Littlejohn | Museum Victoria  

Katie found that the hybrid zone is quite stable which is particularly interesting because the Kinglake area has changed dramatically over the decades through agricultural and residential development. Her fieldwork, completed before the 2009 bushfires, can't comment on the effect of fire on the hybrid zone but she hopes that ongoing surveys will keep an eye on the situation. When she handed in her thesis, her colleague Susi made a special batch of hybrid frog cupcakes to celebrate!

Hybrid frog cupcakes for afternoon tea!`
Image: Susi Maldonado
Source: Susi Madonado  

Natalie Calder's Masters thesis investigated how larval fishes use tide cycles to disperse in Port Phillip Bay. She worked at Governor Reef, near Indented Head on the Bellarine Peninsula, measuring where these tiny hatchlings place themselves in the water column.

As Nat explains, "Upon hatching larvae are translucent, lack scales and are usually less than 1mm long. Studies throughout the first half of the 20th century assumed that larvae were passive particles, at the mercy of tides and currents, with little or no control over where they dispersed."

Three larval fishes. Top: Zeidae (dory family) without fins, jaws or pigmented eyes. Middle: Hemiramphidae (garfish or halfbeak family) in relatively late stage of development, with visible muscle bands. Bottom: Triglidae (gunard or sea robin family) with partially-developed fins, well-developed eyes but still-visible egg yolk sac.
Image: Natalie Calder
Source: Museum Victoria  

Since then, scientists have observed that fish larvae display more complex behaviour, and Nat's research contributes to this body of knowledge. She found that fish larvae are quite selective and effectively 'surf' the tides in and out of Port Phillip Bay by exploiting properties of the currents. They rise in the water column to catch fast-moving surface waters during incoming tides, ensuring they stay in the bay rather than be swept out to sea. This better understanding of how larval fish disperse could help ensure the network of marine protected areas are sufficiently connected to keep fish populations healthy.

Another major piece of Masters research with implications for marine reserves was completed by Skipton Woolley, who used marine worms called polychaetes to model the biodiversity of large-scale ecological systems. Using data from museum collections and from new fieldwork in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, he tested whether polychaetes are a good group to use when assessing biodiversity. The idea is that it's not often practical to count every species in an ecosystem, but if the diversity of one group correlates with biodiversity overall, they become a handy indicator that can be used to compare between regions.

By examining 342 species from seven families, he found that that polychaetes are indeed a useful group, because where you find numerous species of polychaetes, you find numerous species of other animals, such as echinoderms and crustaceans. Thus, concludes Skip, "worms are amazing!"

A scaleworm from Skip's Masters project, Iphione muricata (family Polynoidae). The numerous white hairy structures, or chaetae, are what give this group their name - the polychaetes.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Amazing too are our students who contribute so much to the museum's research work. Well done Katie, Nat and Skip!

Links:

Information for prospective students

MV News: Victoria frogs and bushfires

WA Museum: Marine Life of the Kimberley Region

During the recent Prom Bioscan biodiversity survey of Wilsons Promontory, Dr Joanna Sumner led the herpetology (reptiles and amphibians) group. She and her troops - Katie Smith, Claire Keely, Susi Maldonado, Maggie Haines and Parks Victoria's Steve Wright – used a combination of trapping and active searching to find nine skink species, three elapid snake species and five frog species over several survey sites.

  Claire and Susi checking funnel traps opposite Lilly Pilly Gully carpark.
Image: Jo Sumner
Source: Museum Victoria

Reported Jo,

We captured, tissue sampled and released 59 individual reptiles and amphibians. Tissue samples will be put in our frozen tissue collection and used in research on species identification of some these groups. The overall diversity of reptile species in the Prom is very low compared to other areas in Australia. We sighted all three snakes previously recorded, 50% of known frog species and 75% of skinks known to the area. We did not record any of threatened species previously recorded on the Prom however, such as Litoria raniformis and Egernia coventryi.

If you're ever wondered what herpetology fieldwork looks like, here's a video from Wilsons Prom where Jo explains how she traps skinks and takes tissue samples.

Watch this video with a transcript

Each year, the MV library develops a particular area of the book collection. This year it's the Indigenous section receiving attention, which will assist the team working on the redevelopment of Bunjilaka and the researchers of the Indigenous Cultures Department. Over 50 books, many of them out-of-print and very rare, were purchased from Grants Bookshop for an average price of less than a modern day paperback. With increasing costs for interlibrary loans, purchasing our own copies for MV makes sound financial sense, too.

Display in the MV Library of the newly-aquired books about Indigenous culture and history.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Research associate Jason Gibson talked about the nature of these books, some of which date back to the 1940s. "They often take a classical anthropological perspective, that you don't see much of any more. There were problems with this approach but in terms of the detail captured, it's fantastic." He explained that these books were largely written by non-Indigenous anthropologists attempting an objective, scientific analysis of Indigenous people. "It was often the first time Indigenous languages, traditions and cultural practices had been documented in written form and therefore these texts have become very important for Native Title research as well as museum studies."

Librarian Leonie Cash laments the closure of many of Melbourne's second-hand bookshops that makes these books even harder to obtain. Even now when books are becoming available in electronic form, physical books are still popular for researchers who spend much of their day looking at a computer screen and would prefer to read from paper.

L-R: Jason Gibson, Hayley Webster and Rose Bollen looking at the new books.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The books are on display in the MV Library for staff to peruse and borrow. Of particular interest is the acquisition of the first edition of an American Philosophical Society publication of 1941 Aboriginal Australian String Figures, including string figure illustrations of the bandicoot, python, boomerang, and canoe.

Links:

Indigenous Cultures collections

MV Blog: Following the travelling Tjitingalla

On Wednesday a small team - five scientists and two rangers - were allowed into into the protected heart of Wilsons Prom as part of the Prom Bioscan project. The Vereker Creek Reference Area, colloquially known as Paradise Valley, is largely untouched by recent human activity. It is afforded the highest level of conservation protection and access is strictly limited to infrequent scientific research. The purpose of keeping areas such as Paradise Valley closed is to maintain a pristine reference point against which the impacts of human activity can be measured.

The area contains a stand of Antarctic Southern Beech trees (Nothofagus cunninghamii) and thus the possibility of Gondwanan wildlife. Rare and endangered mammals might still persist there. It's a very exciting opportunity for the specialist team but the first obstacle is getting there. There are no tracks to Paradise Valley, just a long hike through swordgrass taller than their heads after being dropped by helicopter on Five Mile Beach.

Wayne and Richard in their helicopter suits waiting for their turn in the chopper.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria  

I didn't make the cut for the team going in to Paradise Valley, but there was enough room in the helicopter for a couple of us to tag along for the drop-off, which was an adventure in itself. Seeing the Prom from the air was simply amazing.

The beautiful Five Mile Beach seen from above.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria  

Jim Whelan of Parks Victoria and our pilot Ed in the helicopter.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria  

Helicopter taking off for Five Mile Beach carrying field gear and three days' food in a sling beneath it.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

Tomorrow I'm heading to Sealers Cove with about half of the MV scientists for more survey work. We'll be back in the middle of next week with much more to report on the Prom Bioscan.

Lantern slide, about 1920, looking out over Sealers Cove (BA 2950)
Image: A.G. Campbell
Source: Museum Victoria  

Museum Victoria has partnered with Parks Victoria for a two-week intensive biodiversity survey of Wilsons Promontory National Park. The Prom Bioscan project, from 16 to 28 October, is targeting terrestrial, freshwater and marine wildlife and visiting some remote and rarely-visited sites. This rapid census will help Parks Victoria assess the environmental impacts of recent extreme weather events: the 2005 and 2009 fires and the floods in early 2011. On 23 September the southern part of the Prom reopened to visitors after six months of flood repair. Many riparian zones (near creeks and rivers) have changed proundly since the flood, their vegetation and beds scoured away the 370mm of rain that fell in one day in February.

Wilson's Prom is one of Victoria's oldest National Parks. It was first designated a National Park in 1898 due to its unique wilderness, stunning natural beauty and its ease of isolation from the mainland. Its habitats - heathlands, swamps, grasslands, forests and more - house numerous species of plants and animals.

A skink from Wilsons Promontory.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

A lacewing caught at Wilsons Promontory.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Researchers have worked here for decades to document the life and environment of the Prom. The Prom Bioscan is a special case: it's rare to have so many experts working simultaneously across the park. Over 40 Museum Victoria staff and volunteers and 15 Parks Victoria staff are participating.

Karen, Lara and Karen checking mammal traps.
Image: Michela Mitchell
Source: Museum Victoria  

In the first few days, the scientists have observed 69 species of birds, two types of rats, Gondwanan snails, numerous skinks and much more. Some specimens will become part of the Museum Victoria collections whereas others are released after a small tissue sample is taken for genetic research. The days in the field are long, especially for those who follow animals that are active at dawn and dusk, but the stunning surroundings more than make up for it.

Granite boulders, wildflowers and blue sea at Wilsons Promontory.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

You can follow #PromBioscan on Twitter. Tweet your questions for MV scientists about the project to @museumvictoria. 

Links:

Parks Victoria: Wilsons Promontory National Park 

Jason Gibson is a Senior Research Coordinator with the Australian National University and the Indigenous Cultures Department at Museum Victoria.

In 1894 Walter Edmund Roth heard about a performance, called the 'Molong-go' that had been shared by the Wakaya people from the upper reaches of the Georgina River in the Northern Territory with the Pitta Pitta people in outback Queensland. As an ethnographer, Roth was fascinated to hear that the dance had 'originated from a point east or south-east of Darwin'; some hundreds of kilometres from the Queensland desert country where he was stationed. Two years later in 1898 Alice Springs Special Magistrate F.J. Gillen wrote to his friend and collaborator in anthropological studies, the then Professor of Biology at the University of Melbourne Walter Baldwin Spencer, explaining that a corroboree almost identical to the one seen by Roth had appeared in Alice Springs. Gillen explained to Spencer that the dance, known as the Tjitjingalla altharte (corroboree) to the local Arrernte people, had been 'brought down' into the region by a 'northern group'.

Tjitjingalla Corroboree performed in Alice Springs, 1901. The picture depicts one of the dance sequences of the Tjitjingalla as performed by Arrernte people at Alice Springs.
Image: Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer
Source: Museum Victoria  

After attending the performance, which extended over five nights, Gillen reported that the repertoire had indeed originated 1500kms north, in the 'country of the Salt water' and that 'the implements carried by the performers' were 'in all cases the same as described by Roth'. Three years later, during the Spencer and Gillen Expedition of 1901 Spencer collected two of the dancing sticks used in the performance.

Two Tjitjingalla dancing sticks wrapped in human hair string. These dancing sticks were used in one of the dance sequences of the altharte or what Spencer called an ‘ordinary corroboree’.
Image: Justine Philip
Source: Museum Victoria  

Detail of a Tjitjingalla dancing stick.
Image: Justine Phillip
Source: Museum Victoria  

Earlier in the expedition, whilst camped by the Stevenson Creek in the remote north of South Australia, Spencer and Gillen were visited a small group of Lower Arrernte men. Gillen writes, 'we gave them a good feed and after tea rigged the phonograph up and got them to sing into it a number of corroboree songs' and Spencer also noted that the men 'were very much excited and interested, especially as we let them hear the instrument repeating what they had said.' It was here, almost by accident, that one of the Tjitjingalla song verses was recorded. A few weeks later when the expedition reached Alice Springs Spencer spent considerable time photographing and filming the altharte using his Warwick motion film camera. The sound and film recordings made of the Tjitjingalla are some of the earliest ever made on the Australian continent.

Listen to Baldwin Spencer's introduction to the recording, courtesy of the Gillen Collection, Royal Geographic Society of South Australia  (Length 0:29)  
(Download MP3)

"This corroboree, the Tjitjingalla corroboree, was first described by Dr. Roth in north central Queensland. Subsequently was performed by the natives of central Australia [unknown] the Arrernte tribe at Alice Springs. This corroboree was sung on the Stevenson River on March 22nd, 1901."

The peregrination of the Tjitjingalla/Molongo, which was subsequently documented at various locations in South Australia, the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland, later became important to theories regarding the exchange of ideas, songs, dances and mythologies amongst the Australian Indigenous population.

More stories like this are being uncovered in a joint research project between the Australian National University, Museum Victoria and the South Australian Museum. The Reconstructing the Spencer and Gillen Collection Project will produce an online database of the W.B. Spencer and F.J. Gillen collaboration, including objects they collected, their photographs, manuscripts, diaries, correspondence and other material held in over 20 institutions, both in Australia and overseas.

This guest post is by Joanna Wysocki, a public relations student from Victoria University, who has recently completed a work placement at MV.

Since the late 1800s, Kodak has been one of the world's leading companies responsible for developing photography and photographic equipment. It has also played a huge role in recording our personal histories – we all remember sending film off to be processed and waiting eagerly by an empty photo album in the days before digital cameras.

It was over 100 years ago that Eastman Kodak Company founder, George Eastman aimed to make photography accessible to everyone. His vision was to make the process of obtaining photos simple so that anyone could own a camera. The advertising campaign slogan at that time was “You press the button, we do the rest.” Significant time periods such as this one are represented in the Kodak Heritage Collection.

Leaflet - 'Free Repairs to Your Kodak or Brownie', 1938 (HT 19963).
Image: Kodak Australasia Pty Ltd
Source: Museum Victoria

Since 2004, 1200 of the collection's 3100 registered items have been photographed and over 600 items from the Kodak Heritage Collection are on Collections Online. But there are still artefacts, stories and information yet to be discovered.

So, who looks after these Kodak moments?

Since the Volunteer Day in October 2010, former Kodak staff have helped Curator, Fiona Kinsey and Assistant Curator, Angela Jooste to enrich the Kodak Heritage Collection.

Angela, whose main duties are to manage both the collection and Kodak volunteers, says former staff and volunteers have added significant facts and information to the collection.

“From the early days, Kodak cared for the wellbeing of its staff. There is a real sense of loyalty and ownership of Kodak’s history with the former staff volunteering to preserve the collection at the Museum. It’s their knowledge and memories of Kodak that contributes to bringing the Kodak Heritage Collection to life,” said Angela.

Photograph - Kodak Australasia Pty Ltd, Dinner for Returned World War II Personnel, Groups Seated at Tables, Sydney, New South Wales,1946-1947 (MM 96065).
Image: Kodak Australasia Pty Ltd
Source: Museum Victoria

Kodak employed many of its workers’ family members, some of whom spent most of their working lives at the former Coburg and Abbotsford Kodak plants. This has contributed to the community spirit of former staff, as they now want to look after the company that took in generations of their families.

Preserving Kodak’s history will allow future generations to see the significant role Kodak played in the social, cultural and corporate life of Melbourne and Australia, as well as the shift in eras, from analogue to digital.

Links:

MV News: Kodak Heritage Collection

Kodak Heritage Collection on Collections Online

History of Kodak

Imagine that your face was articulated so that your jaw could split down the middle and expand sideways until the tips were out as wide as your ears. Imagine that you could move all the bones of your face... not just the soft tissue, but the bones themselves.

Sound bizarre? Alien, even? Yet this is exactly what happens every time a Blue Whale takes a gulp of water. The filter-feeding whales, otherwise known as baleen whales or mysticetes, have feeding adaptations that are unique among mammals. Their intriguing evolutionary history is the subject of Dr Erich Fitzgerald's research, and today he's published a paper that overturns a long-held belief about how the baleen whales evolved.

Illustration of the biggest mouth in history at work. The Blue Whale can expand its mouth to gulp huge volumes of krill-filled water.
Image: Carl Buell
Source: Museum Victoria

For several years, he has worked on an extraordinary 25 million-year-old species known from fossils that were found in the 1990s near Jan Juc on Victoria's west coast. Called Janjucetus, this early baleen whale predated the evolution of baleen – the hairy structure used by modern baleen whales to filter tiny crustaceans from the sea. Instead, Janjucetus had the large eyes and ferocious teeth of a hunter.

Dr Erich Fitzgerald holding the jaws of Janjucetus with Melbourne Museum's massive Blue Whale skeleton in the background.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

There are two key changes in the skull that permit the filter feeding of modern whales. The first is a lower jaw that can split down the middle. In humans, the seam (or symphysis) where the two halves of the jawbone meet at our chin is fused, thus our jaws are rigid. In contrast, baleen whales have greatly elongated jawbones that do not meet in the middle. The second change is in the width of the upper jaw; baleen whales have evolved a wide mouth, allowing them to engulf massive volumes of water.

"Previously it was thought that the origins of both features were intimately linked to filter-feeding and that's what differentiated baleen whales from toothed whales and dolphins," explains Erich. His research has just overturned this theory since Janjucetus had a wide upper jaw yet its lower jaw had a tightly connected, immobile symphysis. "So, the loose symphysis is not typical of all baleen whales, it's a later innovation. The earliest baleen whales could not expand and contract their lower jaws so were anatomically incapable of filter-feeding, yet they had these wide upper jaws."

The fossilised jaws of Janjucetus, clearly showing the immobile symphysis at the tip.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

What Erich describes is an elegant example of an exaptation, where a feature evolved to serve a particular function but was later co-opted into a new role. Erich believes that its wide jaw helped Janjucetus to suck in large singe prey items, such as squid or fish, and didn't evolve for filter-feeding at all.

Says Erich, "Charles Darwin reflected upon this in The Origin of Species. He wondered how you could go from a whale that has big teeth like Janjucetus does and catching fish and squid one at a time, to something like a modern Blue Whale that feeds en masse. This is the kind of fossil palaeontologists dream of finding because it shows a transitional form."

"It's an exciting discovery, but actually not as surprising as you might think," concludes Erich. "Evolution by natural selection implies that we should expect to find these kinds of fossils in the rocks." The next question he looks forward to answering is how whales shifted from suction feeding to filter-feeding. "I think we're really close to finding a transitional series of fossils that illuminate this."

Erich's paper about this discovery, 'Archaeocete-like jaws in a baleen whale', is published today in Biology Letters.

Links:

Video: Erich discusses whale evolution

MV News: Ferocious fossil

Dr Erich Fitzgerald's staff biography

Baleen and toothed whales

When Dr Tony Martin joined MV palaeontologist Dr Tom Rich and volunteer Greg Denney on a four-week examination of Victoria's Cretaceous coastline last year, he was hoping to find dinosaur burrows. He didn't expect that he'd find the most significant dinosaur track site in southern Australia instead.

Dr Martin of Emory University, Georgia, was at Museum Victoria recently to examine some trace fossils in the collection. Trace fossils are his speciality and he's spent many years studying the burrows, tracks and trails of prehistoric animals preserved in the fossil record. Decades of searching for tracks at palaeontological sites worldwide means that he has an eye for spotting these subtle and sometimes cryptic trace fossils.

Late in the day during the third week of the Cretaceous Walk, Dr Martin saw something unusual in a slab of rock. Because of the low light he didn't trust his eyes and starting feeling the surface. "I was in awe at first," he says. "One of the things I did was I put my fingers into the indentations and thought OK, that's a track. Then I traced back and found two more, identically sized, making this the first Victorian trackway we know of where there's an actual sequence of steps."

Dr Tony Martin with the dinosaur trackway he found on Melanesia Beach.
Source: Museum Victoria

Until that moment, only four individual dinosaur tracks were known for all of Victoria. But that wasn't the only discovery of the day. Greg Denney long-time local collaborator on the Dinosaur Cove digs, spotted something else. "He saw there was another slab nearby of the same thickness, with the same layers, but upside down. He grabbed a piece of driftwood and flipped it over - and there were seven more tracks on it."

All up, the two slabs have increased the number of Victorian dinosaur tracks by 85 per cent. "They're only about 1.1 square metres but it was a busy little piece of real estate, because there are approximately 24 tracks within that." Some of the footprints are partial tracks and many are very faint but they still reveal a lot about the Victorian environment over 100 million years ago. The dinosaurs in question were small predatory dinosaurs, ranging from about the size of a rooster to the size of a cassowary. They belonged to a group of animals called the ornithomimosaurs, or bird-mimics. Dr Martin postulates that the individuals may have been different ages, and they were walking over swampy areas left on receding snowmelt floodplains in springtime.

In March 2011, Museum Victoria retrieved the two slabs for the palaeontology collection as they were at risk of being lost from erosion and burial. A scientific paper by Dr Martin, Dr Rich and three other experts that describes the amazing find was published in the journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology yesterday. As Dr Martin summarised it, "I've made other discoveries in my life, and I wouldn't like to rank them, but this one's way up there. It's one I feel very satisfied with that it added quite a bit to what's already a huge wealth of information that's come out of this part of the world."

In this video, Tom Rich talks more about the trackway and the effort to remove the slabs from Melanesia Beach.

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Martin, A.J., Rich, T.H., Hall, M., Vickers-Rich, P. & Vazquez-Prokopec, G. A polar dinosaur-track assemblage from the Eumeralla Formation (Albian), Victoria, Australia. Alcheringa, 1–18.

The Age: 'Walking in their footsteps on Victoria's dinosaur trail'

Dinosaur Walk

Karen Rowe is a Research Associate at MV where she studies evolutionary ecology and behaviour in birds and mammals.

Record levels of rainfall in the Northern Territory have brought forth one of Australia’s rare and unique native mammals, the Long-haired, or Plague Rat (Rattus villosissimus). These herbivorous rats feed largely on stems and leaves and, with consistently high rainfall, large areas of the desert landscape have become lush with food. Coupled with an unusually high reproductive rate, where a single female can produce more than 200 young in one year, these rats are capable of large-scale population explosions leading to rapid dispersal over huge distances. They have even been documented moving as much as 3 km in a single night.

In the past, these rodents have spread across the arid regions of Australia, including eastern Western Australia, the Northern Territory, eastern Queensland and parts of South Australia. Historic plagues have been documented as far back as 1847, with others occurring in 1916-18, 1930-32, 1940-42, 1948, 1950-52, 1956, and 1966-69.

Once the plague recedes, they vanish almost as quickly as they arrived and during non-plague years, they become rare and hard to find, persisting in only a few locations.

Taking advantage of this unique opportunity to document the latest plague, I joined MV mammal curator, Kevin Rowe, and collections manager, Wayne Longmore, to try to find these rats in the Northern Territory, along the Finke River.

MV curator, Kevin Rowe (left), and collections manager, Wayne Longmore (right), trapping rats in the desert rain.
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

We found them in abundance – nearly all of our live traps contained a long-haired rat, and one had two!

Rattus villosissimus caught along the Finke River.
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

We even found part of the skeleton of one in a bird pellet – the undigested material regurgitated by a bird, particularly in birds of prey.

Bird pellet before dissection.
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

After dissection – most of the skull and jaw were intact (on left).
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

Long-haired rats build burrows in the sand, consisting of meters of tunnels with multiple entrances and exits. They use these burrows extensively, spending nearly 80% of their time underground.

Rattus villosissimus burrow entrance.
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

At the Finke River site, the sandy soil made it easy to see footprints into and out of these burrows.

Rattus villosissimus footprints.
Image: Karen Rowe
Source: Karen Rowe

Kevin and Wayne are still on the hunt for the plague rat, hoping to find more populations in the Barkly Tablelands and central NT. By studying these rats from throughout the state and recording natural history data such as behaviour and habitat, as well as traits of the rats themselves, including age and reproductive state, we can better understand the ecology and biology of this unique, native, and (most of the time!) rare mammal.

Links:

MV Blog: On rats

The stars of the Bugs Alive! aquatic display Green Diving Beetles (Onychohydrus scutellaris) are remarkable for their ability to store air and dive underwater to hunt food and find mates. They are found Australia-wide and on warm nights are attracted to lights. Recently on the Gold Coast there was a report of thousands of these beetles coming into the lights on the foreshore and the ground around the lights was a black moving mass.

Adapted to a life in the water, Green Diving Beetles have streamlined bodies, paddle like hind legs with swimming hairs and an amazing ability to store pockets of air so they can dive under water for extended periods of time.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

Although sometimes they can be locally common they are predators and tend to live in water bodies, like dams and lakes at densities that do not deplete prey numbers too much; once prey numbers get too low, these beetles fly to a new water body and establish themselves there.   

Adults lay their eggs in the water where tiny predatory larvae hatch out. The larvae spend their entire larval stage in the water before digging into the muddy banks of ponds and pupating. Once mature, the adults can either hang out where they emerged or fly and disperse to other areas where the food source is more readily available.

Over the last 12 months in Victoria, like many parts of Australia, has had increased rainfall which allows the beetles to disperse and breed at a greater rate than over the last few years of drought. Live Exhibits staff are predicting a great summer for Green Diving Beetles and they may turn up a bit more often in the Melbourne metropolitan area. Live Exhibits staff will be heading out equipped with torches, nets and wadders to see if we can hunt down these incredible animals.

Green Diving Beetles can be voracious feeders; here a group of them are feasting on a dead fish at the Melbourne Museum.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

These beetles are active predators and scavengers and add a great degree of movement and colour to our Bugs Alive! display. As they forage they constantly return to the surface of the water to replenish their air supply which they hold under their elytra (wing covers). They eat other aquatic invertebrates and in the wild will sometimes attack vertebrates such as small fish and tadpoles.

Dr Gillian Bowen is the Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Ancient History, Monash University. Join her for "Tutankhamun’s wardrobe", an exploration of Ancient Egyptian attire, Tuesday 26 July 2011, as part of the Tutankhamun Tuesdays Public Lecture Program.

Dr Gillian Bowen.
Source: Dr Gillian Bowen

In 1922, when Howard Carter first opened the virtually-intact tomb of Tutankhamun, he astounded the world with the vast array of treasure. Among the items, which received little attention from the public but were meticulously recorded by Carter, was the king’s wardrobe: his underwear, tunics, kilts, gloves, socks, shoes and sandals. This is the only substantial collection of items from a royal wardrobe to survive from ancient Egypt.

Many of the garments were poorly preserved as the cloth had disintegrated over the millennia and the elaborate beadwork had fallen off. To preserve these precious items, Carter employed Alfred Lucas, a chemist and specialist conservator. Surprisingly, other clothes were in perfect condition. The garments, along with the iconography such as that shown on the gilded throne, allow us to glimpse the wardrobe of Tutankhamun and his queen, Ankhenenamun. The items represent the height of fashion in the late 18^th Dynasty.

Amongst the garments, Carter counted around 145 loincloths, which functioned as underwear, and 81 pieces of footwear. Some of the ceremonial clothes are made of the finest linen which resembles silk and the embroidery and beadwork on these garments and the shoes is exquisite. The marquetry sandals are made of wood, leather, bark, plaster and the decoration is in gold. The scenes show the traditional enemies of Egypt, the so-called “nine bows” on which the king tramples. These items were made by specialist craftsmen as well as the women in the king’s harem. Very few items from Tutankhamun’s wardrobe are on display in the Egyptian Museum and this talk offers one of the few opportunities to view images of the garments.

A photograph by museum entomologist Dr Ken Walker has just won a coveted place in the annual international Leica calendar. In 2012, the company’s calendar will feature microscope photographs, and Leica put out a call for entries. Ken’s photograph of the head of a tiny, undescribed lichen moth in the genus Chamaita (family Arctiidae) was one of 12 selected.

The winning photograph of the head of a male lichen moth.
Image: Ken Walker
Source: Museum Victoria

The photograph, as well as being incredibly beautiful, is an important diagnostic tool.  This species is a pest in palm plantations in New West Britain, Papua New Guinea. To assist those who need to identify it, the species has its own page , featuring the winning photograph and others, on PaDIL (Pests and Diseases Image Library).

Says Ken, "It’s a great recognition for the photographic skills we have developed here over the past six years to have an image to be used in the high-quality calendar." The competition was open to anyone using Leica microscope and camera equipment; the prize is a Leica EZ4 dissecting microscope. This prize will go right back into PaDIL’s suite of specialist technical equipment to create more photographs like this one. 

Links:

PaDIL

Astronomy is all about looking outward; discovering and piecing together exactly what makes up our Universe. And let's face it, there's a really big Universe out there and in cosmic terms it can make us feel pretty insignificant.

But this July, that changed a little. During the annual scientific meeting of the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA), held at the University of Adelaide, I organised a session that encouraged astronomers to turn their focus inwards.

 Astronomers spend time sharing their personal experiences and expertise.
Source: Museum Victoria

Yes, something strange was going on in this lecture theatre - we called it "Speed Meet a Mentor". The idea was to shuffle through as many conversations as time allowed, so attendees were asked to just use the seats near each aisle for easy mobility.

As the organisor of the event, I was amazed that once people had taken a seat and were paired off, the conversations just started to flow. I had put together a list of conversation starters, which seemed to do the trick. There was no reason to fear that people wouldn't know where to begin - in the end, I didn't even need to explain how it was going to work!

"Speed Meet a Mentor" was an idea that came out of a highly successful workshop organised by the ASA's Women in Astronomy Chapter. The workshop was designed to highlight issues faced by women during their career. But in turn, it generated discussions and ideas that could benefit the whole astronomical community, like this one.

The event was very successful with around 70 people attending. Many of the mentors signed up early, while there was a flood of students at the last minute. The feedback was positive; it was fun and worthwhile. Many even said  they would have liked it to have gone longer than the 45 minutes we had stolen from the day's lunch break.

I know the importance of mentoring and am passionate about providing opportunites for people to develop and further their careers by gaining insights from others. I hope that this little experiment may have sparked some new possibilities for learning from each other.

And I must say, many thanks to the Museum's own Dr Andi who has been running such events for many years and offered some much appreciated advice and expertise. It was fun to see my impromptu idea become a reality.

In 2007, Museum Victoria research scientists described the world's tiniest starfish, the Paddle-spined Seastar. Here are three of them under the microscope last week, filmed by Ben Healley.

Like all starfish, these animals are powered by many legs called tube feet. Each has a sucker on the tip which is how they crawl around and hang upside down under rocks. On the video they appear transparent so are difficult to see moving out from underneath each arm. They stick to the glass and drag the animal across the surface.

They don’t have eyes but they do have eyespots. You can also see these on the video. They are the dark patches at the tip of each arm, on top of the animal. Detecting light and dark, they help the animal tell if it is under a ledge or on top of it, or whether something large, like a possible predator, is passing overhead.

Interestingly, the individual pictured in reports when this species was discovered has five legs, not six. According to MV curator Dr Tim O'Hara, "it’s typical for this species to have six arms but every now and then, you’ll get an uneven split during reproduction and end up with a five-armed individual.”

Links:

MV News: Tiny star

Dr J. Patrick Greene is an archaeologist and the CEO of Museum Victoria.

At Christmas I read the biography of Howard Carter, who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. In January I followed in his footsteps to Egypt, visiting the pyramids on the Giza plateau, then Saqqara to see the Stepped Pyramid of Djoser, then Luxor and Karnak (ancient Thebes, centre of the worship of the god Amun) and finally, across the Nile to the Valley of the Kings.

 Ornately carved pillars at Karnak temple.
Image: Patrick Greene
Source: Museum Victoria

Excavation of Ptolemaic era baths outside the main entrance to Karnak temple.
Image: Patrick Greene
Source: Museum Victoria

To enter the tomb in which Tutankhamun was buried was an extraordinary experience. In 1922 there were over 5000 astonishing objects in the tomb, stacked one on top of the other, that took Carter and his team ten years to carefully remove, record, conserve and then pack for their journey to the Cairo Museum. As I stepped into the burial chamber I felt something of the excitement that Carter had felt as he peered through the sealed blocking wall for the first time. The beautiful sarcophagus is still there, carved with the protective deities with wings outstretched that guarded the young king as he began his journey to the afterlife. So too is Tutankhamun; his mummy has never left the tomb except for a short journey outside for a CT scan a few years ago.

I was lucky enough to have the tomb to myself for ten minutes or so, to absorb the atmosphere and marvel at the paintings on the walls of the burial chamber. Photographs are forbidden, quite rightly, not just to help preserve the pigments of the paintings but also the sense of awe. When some other visitors eventually entered they concluded that the sarcophagus and mummified body were replicas. I was able to reassure them that they were not!

My fascinating journey to Egypt included a visit to the Cairo Museum to see the objects that Howard Carter had so carefully sent down the Nile. Visitors clustered around one object in particular, the famous gold funerary mask that never leaves Egypt. Some of the cases had notes to say that the objects that they normally contained were part of an international exhibition. With pride I knew where they were heading—to Melbourne Museum to be displayed in the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition that opened in April.

 Patrick Greene outside the famous Cairo Museum, where treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamun are housed.
Source: Museum Victoria

I couldn't take photographs in the tomb, or in the Cairo Museum for that matter, but elsewhere I was given access to sites and met with fellow archaeologists making exciting discoveries that I was able to photograph. A selection of my images has now been published by Museum Victoria in a book that is hot off the press. Its title? Egypt: a fascinating journey.

Links:

Egypt: a fascinating journey

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs

Watch Dr Greene's lecture: 'An Archaeologist Visits Ancient Egypt'

GIVEAWAY

We have a signed copy of Patrick's book to give away to a blog reader. To enter, leave a comment on this post by noon on Thursday 30 June with your answer to this question:

What fascinates you about Egypt?  

UPDATE: Thank you to all the entrants! Patrick has chosen JessB as the winner, saying:

“I was spoilt for choice in deciding the winner of my book.  I had no idea who had written the blog entries as they were shown to me without names attached.  I made a shortlist, and finally chose my winner, which expresses so eloquently the captivating beauty of the artists and crafts people whose creations still speak to us over the distance of time.”

In March this year, MV scientists spent 10 days surveying the biodiversity of the Lake Condah area in a program called Bush Blitz. The project could never have happened without the collaboration and assistance of the Gunditjmara community, the Traditional Owners of Budj Bim lands around Lake Condah.

On Friday last week, the museum was pleased to return the hospitality and show a group of Budj Bim rangers and Traditional Owners around the collection stores and laboratories of the Natural Sciences Department.

Budj Bim rangers in the Ornithology store, surrounded by the museum's collection of bird specimens.
Source: Museum Victoria

Head of Sciences, Mark Norman, led a tour through the ornithology, entomology and marine collection stores. The bird collection was their favourite but the giant squid in its huge tank of ethanol was a special highlight too.

 Mark Norman showing an amazing but somewhat pungent giant squid specimen.
Source: Museum Victoria

Today’s visit was a chance to show the rangers what has happened to the Lake Condah specimens they helped to collect, and the sort of research done in the museum. We hope they’ll visit us again soon. Until then, here's a reminder of the significance of Lake Condah and the aquaculture practiced there by Gunditjmara people for thousands of years. In this video, Joseph Saunders explains eel farming and traditional life at Lake Condah.

Links:

Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape

Poking around in Victorian coastal tide pools is good fun. You can feel the sucker feet of a sea star as it walks over your hand, or watch crabs scuttle about grazing on algae. But one thing you should never do – and I remember being told this from a very young age – is bother a blue-ringed octopus. Blue-ringed octopuses (genus Hapalochlaena) are some of the most venomous marine animals in the world yet we don’t know much about them.

Southern Blue-ringed Octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) photographed in Port Phillip Bay during the day.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

There are currently four species of blue-ringed octopus recognised but MV curator Dr Julian Finn reckons he’s about to change this. He has just received a three-year grant from the Australian Biological Resources Study to sort out how many species there are worldwide. From his preliminary studies, he estimates there could be closer to 20 species with over half of these living in Australian waters.

With joint investigators Dr Mark Norman, Head of Sciences, Dr Jan Strugnell from La Trobe University, and Professor Chung Cheng Lu of National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan, Julian will use comparative anatomy and molecular techniques to confirm how many species there are. He’ll map the distribution of each species and produce an identification key to help others identify blue-ringed octopuses.

Southern Blue-ringed Octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) photographed in Port Phillip Bay at night.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Julian will also assay the venom of each species to determine which are the most toxic to humans. The bite of a blue-ringed octopus delivers a hit of tetrodotoxin which is found in the octopus’s saliva. Tetrodotoxin has a devastating effect on the nerve system; it blocks sodium channels and causes breathing difficulties, numbness and paralysis. There is no antivenom and without immediate medical intervention, the risk of death is high. Thanks to this project, we’ll better understand one of our most notorious marine creatures and have more information to assist with treating blue-ringed octopus bites.

Southern Blue-ringed Octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) photographed in Port Phillip Bay at night.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Australian Venom Research Unit: blue-ringed octopus

A rare event happened this morning... when my 1 year old started calling out for Mummy just after 4am, the usual dread of having to face another cold and early start was gone, replaced by the thrill that my little guy was just the perfect astronomer!

This morning we were treated to a total lunar eclipse and it began with a beautiful starry, but certainly cold, morning sky. Just before 4.30am a small chunk was seen to be missing from the top right of the Moon. The first sign that the Earth's shadow had found its target.

The Earth's shadow hit its target.
Image: Tanya Hill
Source: Museum Victoria

Lunar eclipses occur on those rare occasions when the Sun, Earth and Moon are in perfect alignment. They only ever happen at the time of Full Moon, when the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides of the Earth. Most of the time the Earth's shadow misses the Moon, falling either above or below it, but this morning it was right on track.

By 5am, the Earth's shadow was covering more than half the Moon and a reddish glow was already beginning to appear. The stars was twinkling perfectly, with one of my favourite constellations, that of Scorpius, sitting directly to the left of the Moon, and the centre of the Milky Way right above it. Totality officially began at 5.23am and the Moon was certainly an eerie red colour.

Where does that red come from? Well the only way sunlight can now reach the Moon is by passing through the Earth's atmosphere. That light gets bent and scattered, so only the reddest light can make it through. Particles in our atmosphere, like the volcanic ash that's been annoying so many air travellers these last few days, added to the scattering effect, making the eclipse redder and darker than the last few that I remember.

For those who love statistics, totality was due to last 100 minutes, making it the longest lunar eclipse since 2000, which clocked in at 106 minutes. A rough rule of thumb is that totality generally takes around 1 hour, but a couple of times each decade we get a good one lasting 90 minutes or more. This was one of those.

Except for those pesky clouds that rolled in just after 6am, blocking the view for those who got up at their usual time. They were obviously in need of my own precious little alarm clock.

I loved the Far Out, Brussel Sprout books when I was a kid. Do you remember them? They stood from the other children’s books because they were filled with all the cheeky rhymes and sayings that kids actually used in the playground, rather than the sterilised stuff that teachers and parents wanted us to read. These books were compiled by Dr June Factor, writer and folklorist, and founding editor of the journal Play and Folklore.

Play and Folklore is devoted to recording and discussing what children do when largely free of adult direction or control—their colloquial speech, songs, games, rhymes, riddles, jokes, insults and secret languages. Established in 1981, it has been published online by Museum Victoria since 2001 and the April issue just released celebrates the journal’s 30th anniversary.

Paper football made from newspaper was constructed at Carlton North Primary School in the mid-1980s. Footballer Peter McKenna describes playing with a newspaper footy as a child in the 1950s in the April 2011 Play and Folklore.
Image: Jennifer McNair
Source: Museum Victoria

Dr June Factor and Dr Gwenda Davey began publishing the then-titled Australian Children’s Folklore Newsletter out of the Institute of Early Childhood Development that later became part of the University of Melbourne. Keen observers of children, Dr Factor and Dr Davey began collecting and preserving their folklore in the 1970s. This became the Australian Children’s Folklore Collection (ACFC) which they donated to Museum Victoria in 1999. In 2004, it became the first MV collection to be placed in on the prestigious UNESCO Australian Memory of the World register.

Slingshot made from a tree branch, circa 1980-1983. Found on the steps of the Institute of Early Childhood Development, Kew, by Dr June Factor. It had been left there by children who often used the empty car park as a playground at weekends. In the background are index cards used by Dr Factor to record children's rhymes.
Image: Michelle McFarlane
Source: Museum Victoria

Deborah Tout-Smith, Senior Curator of Cultural Diversity, is the curator for the ACFC and oversees the production of Play and Folklore. “Children’s folklore is amazing repository of cultural information. In the past a lot of study into children has been adults looking at children [whereas] children’s folklore is a cultural world children themselves preserve and articulate,” said Deborah. “June Factor pointed out that information is handed on between children and never enters the adult world. Sometimes we see remnants of old ideas and practices that have disappeared in the adult world but still continue in children’s folklore.”

The study of children’s folklore has been important while researching the newly-opened exhibition at the Immigration Museum, Identity: yours, mine, ours. “We find the roots of prejudice in the ways children start to notice difference,” explained Deb. “There are distinct phases of understanding that can end up hardening into prejudice, or can become part of embracing difference.” Both the ACFC and Play and Folklore capture children’s culture from around the world and while they have a distinctly Australian flavour, they include the layers of influence from migrant children over the decades.

Links:

Play and Folklore archive (1981-current)

Collections Online: Australian Children's Folklore Collection

Infosheet: Australian Children's Folklore Collection

I recently accompanied Richard Marchant to the Shoalhaven River where he studies the animals that platypus eat. Thanks to the suction sampling tool we used, I'll never look at a common household vacuum cleaner the same way again.

The underwater vacuum we used is a quite different to that used to clean carpets: suction, in this case, created by bubbles are injected near the base of a pipe. The bubbles rise to the top, sucking water upward as they go.

Richard Marchant diving with the air-lift sampler, which works like an aquatic vacuum cleaner.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

When placed over a river bed or sea floor, small animals and sand are also sucked up with the water. A mesh bag covering the top of the pipe acts like a sieve; the sand passes out but the animals remain trapped.

This method of suction sampling typically nets catches of crustaceans, insects, and insect nymphs – important food chain species that can be identified and counted for research.

Emptying the mesh bag of the air-lift sampler.
Source: Museum Victoria

The machine sounds weird too: a dull rumble through a dive hood, perhaps a cross between a V8 car engine and thunder.

The air-sucking principle of the vacuum means people refer to it as an 'air-lift'. It’s a nifty invention and a system used by many aquatic biologists at one time or another in their career.

Links:

MV News: Linking the food chain

Video: Studying the diet of platypus

I learned this week that sea cucumbers slink along the sea floor with a hidden skeleton. Known to most of us as those sloppy, sausage-like things that sometimes wash-up on our beaches, sea cucumbers are pretty much a tube of muscle with a mouth at one end and an anus at the other. Underwater, they bury in sand or camouflage themselves against rocky reefs.

A colourful sea cucumber (or holothuroid).
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Rather than running through the middle of the body, the skeleton effectively surrounds the body to reinforce the muscular body tube. It is made up of tiny structures called ossicles, which can be fifty times smaller than a millimetre. They are like miniature fish scales, but more intricate in design and not usually visible. Some of the structures make some animals sticky to touch.

Here’s an example of the ossicles of an Antarctic species:

Ossicles from Sigmodota contorta, a species misidentified under about ten different names. Wheel and hook forms on the left from the body wall, and branched rods on the right from the tentacles.
Source: O’Loughlin and VandenSpiegel (2010) Memoirs of Museum Victoria 67: 61–95.

These weird and spectacular structures vary in form. Not only do they prevent the body from turning into a mush of intestine and muscle, but they are also a microscopic key to identify many species – so don’t be too disappointed if you can’t identify a sea cucumber when diving or looking in a rock pool!

Oh and if you're interested...

Sea cucumbers belong to a group of animals called holothuroids, part of the wider group of echinoderms – more commonly known for its sea stars and sea urchins. MV Honorary Associate Mark O’Loughlin is a world expert in identifying sea cucumbers. He has shown me a few tricks of the trade on his way to describing over 20 new species in recent years from Victoria and its neighbouring oceans. He is currently sorting out whether the common local species, Paracaudina australis, is actually multiple undescribed species. His work was recently published in the Memoirs of Museum Victoria.

Links:

O’Loughlin, P. Mark and Didier VandenSpiegel. A revision of Antarctic and some Indo-Pacific apodid sea cucumbers (Echinodermata: Holothuroidea: Apodida) Memoirs of Museum Victoria 67: 61-95 (2010)

Question of the Week: Aboriginal-Indonesian trade in sea cucumber

Reef Education Network: Sea cucumbers

We have many different types of snail here at Melbourne Museum. They range from the very well-known Common Garden Snail (Cantareus aspersa), which was introduced into Australia from Europe in the early 1800s, to Australia’s largest snail, the Giant Panda Snail (Hedleyella falconeri), from the forests around the border of New South Wales and Queensland. There are many differences between the snails in our collection but one trait that they generally share is what they eat. Most snails are herbivorous and feed on plant matter or fungi – much to the frustration of many gardeners. However, some snails have different eating habits and they are in fact carnivorous. We have one such predatory creature here.

Carnivorous snail feeding on a Common Garden Snail.
Image: David Paddock
Source: Museum Victoria

Now, a snail is not exactly known for its speed, but these snails actually chase down and eat other animals, feeding on worms and other molluscs, including snails. While what they eat is different, the way that they eat is exactly the same. Snails have a radula – a tongue-like structure covered by rows of rasping teeth. To see the feeding structure (mouth) of a snail, place it on a clear glass sheet and watch from below.

Carnivorous snail eating a Common Garden Snail.
Image: David Paddock
Source: Museum Victoria

These pictures were taken here at Melbourne Museum in our back-of-house animal care facility. The smaller carnivorous snail (Terrycarlessia tubinata) is eating a Common Garden Snail. A few days later all that was left of the victim was an empty shell!

If you are interested in snails and would like to see some of Australia's biggest species, come along to Melbourne Museum and see our Rainforest Snails and Giant Panda Snails on display now in Bugs Alive.

Links:

Infosheet: Land snails of Victoria

MV Blog: Snail of a surprise

MV marine biologist Dr Jo Taylor has reported a tropical stowaway in the warm waters around the Newport Power Station - the Sand Shrimp, Crangon uritai.

Sand Shrimp Crangon uritai blends in perfectly with the sandy habitats in which it lives.
Image: John Eichler
Source: Museum Victoria

This little crustacean with its cunning camouflage is common in East Asian coastal regions and is not native to Australia. Although other species belonging to the same family (Crangonidae) are common in Australian waters, including Port Phillip Bay, this is the first occurrence of this species anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere.

Reported this week in the online scientific journal, Marine Biodiversity Records, Jo and her co-author Dr Tomoyuki Komai suspect the shrimp was accidentally introduced to Port Phillip Bay. This new sand shrimp probably hitch-hiked in ship ballast while in its tiny larval form. It's only the second confirmed introduction of a shrimp to Australia.

Dorsal and lateral view of the Sand Shrimp.
Image: David Staples
Source: Museum Victoria

Three specimens were found in 2008 by members of the Marine Research Group and were identified after comparisons with specimens at the Natural History Museum and Institute in Chiba, Japan. Jo has alerted local biologists and ecologists to keep an eye out for the newcomer so we can track its movement, if any, in local waters.

Links:

Article in Marine Biodiversity Records (abstract only)

Infosheet: Introduced marine organisms in Port Phillip Bay

Sand Shrimp on PaDIL

In this video, Head of Sciences Mark Norman and Gunditjmara Elder Ken Saunders talk about the recent Bush Blitz project at Lake Condah.

Watch this video with a transcript

More Bush Blitz video is coming soon!

Bush Blitz is a three-year national project to document plants and animals protected in Australia’s National Reserve System. Bush Blitz is a multi-million dollar partnership between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and the Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots. It involves Australia’s top scientists from museums, herbariums and research institutions across the country.

Links:

Bush Blitz

Lake Condah Sustainable Development Project

ABC Mission Voices: Lake Condah

This morning Patrick Honan from Live Exhibits instructed the Bush Blitz team to keep an eye out for Mountain Katydids (Acripeza reticulata). These are large, robust long-horned grasshoppers that are usually found in cold high-altitude areas so Patrick was surprised to see them recorded in a previous ecological survey of Lake Condah. Ranger Brad Williams and botanist Val Stajsic brought in two specimens from Muldoons that they’d found on Tuesday, suggesting that they’re reasonably common here.

Muldoons is property adjacent to the Lake Condah Mission site but getting there is not straightforward. There was a bridge decades ago dating back to when it was the hunting ground for people living on the mission. Matt Butt, the Coordinator of Land Management, explained that the bridge was washed away in a heavy flood in the 1940s. The road into the property was built only five years ago and the terrain is incredibly rocky. It’s also incredibly beautiful; the bush is largely intact since the ground was too rocky to be any good for agriculture. The ground is dotted with rock-lined sinkholes in the lava flow from Mount Eccles (known to Gunditjmara people as Budj Bim, meaning ‘high head’). Some of the sinkholes are full of water where Remko Leijs, from the South Australian Museum, has sampled the small crustaceans that live in the groundwater. Later in Bush Blitz some of the MV marine scientists will put on their SCUBA gear to film the wildlife of these water bodies.

Most of the MV biologists were at Muldoons for a couple of hours this morning and found some amazing animals. And yes, one of them was a Mountain Katydid plodding through low grass just a metre away from the road. She’s a female and particularly fat, possibly because she’s full of eggs. She’s gone back to Melbourne Museum with the Live Exhibits staff where they hope she will be the start of a captive colony for display.

Female Mountain Katydid found at Muldoons.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Budj Bim rangers Simone Sailor-Smith and Deb Rose caught a beautiful Jewel Spider (Austracantha minax). Another amazing find was a Peripatus or velvet worm. These are ancient animals that share some characteristics with worms and some with arthropods, and haven’t changed much in millions of years.

The tiny and beautiful velvet worm found at Muldoons.
Image: julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

We also found scorpions, centipedes, beetles, lacewings, ants and lizards. Where possible, the team is only collecting the first specimen that is caught and releasing subsequent finds. For birds and mammals, the surveys are by sight, by ear or through capture and release. The birders spent a few hours this afternoon at Lake Condah and reported breeding Musk Ducks plus three Reed Warblers which is interesting because they have usually flown north by this time of year.

One of the hungry tiger leeches that are common in swamps, on low shrubs, and clinging to Bush Blitzers!
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Of course, all this time we're spending in swamps is great for one local animal - the leech. We've all become quite good at spotting and flicking leeches before they latch on to feed, but some of us have still become hosts for these blood-sucking parasites...

Peter Lillywhite with a leech feeding on his neck.
Image: Berlinda Bowler
Source: Berlinda Bowler

Bush Blitz is a three-year biodiversity discovery program supported by the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots.

The only way to learn about the biodiversity of an area is to get out there and look. That’s exactly what a team of scientists, including 24 MV staff and volunteers, is doing at the Lake Condah area in south-western Victoria for the next nine days.

The expedition is part of Bush Blitz – a three-year project to document the flora and fauna of Australia’s National Reserve system. As a partnership between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots, Bush Blitz teams have identified about 350 new species on eight trips so far. The current trip is especially significant because it’s the first one to be held in an Indigenous Protected Area – the Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape, comprising about 3,000 hectares over several properties.

Open woodland at Kurtonitj, one of the properties that comprise the Winda Mara owned and managed areas.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria

This country is the traditional homeland of the Gunditjmara Nation. Within its rocky, volcanic landscape are ancient structures including eel traps and stone houses. For thousands of years this was a site of major aquaculture efforts where Gunditjmara created pools and channels to cultivate and harvest eels. However Europeans arrived in the 1830s and within 30 years, the Aboriginal population had been decimated and displaced. The Government established Lake Condah Mission to house the people who refused to leave, but in 1919 the mission was closed and in the 1950s the land was reassigned to returning WWII soldiers. But this is a tough mob; in 1996, the Gunditjmara community persisted and they lodged a claim for native title to their lands. It was finally granted in 2007 and Lake Condah was returned to Aboriginal people.

A kangaroo eyeing off the Bush Blitz crew at Kurtonitj.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria

Until 1 April, Bush Blitz will be taking a snapshot of the life of this region. There are botanists from the National Herbarium of Victoria and entomologists from the South Australian Museum and the University of New South Wales among the Bush Blitz crew. We’re counting and photographing and collecting to learn more about what lives here – which will, in turn, aid its protection. Working with the Elders of the community and the Indigenous rangers means that the scientists will learn about the ecological knowledge of the Traditional Owners, too.

Three MV biologists spotlighting for frogs on the first night at Lake Condah.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria

Uncle Kenny Saunders came to talk to us the night that we arrived and gave us a warm welcome. He spoke about the spiritual and cultural importance of the area to the 300 or so Gunditjmara living locally and the much larger population of Gunditjmara now living across Australia. After telling us his stories he left us with an inspirational challenge – that he hoped these scientific surveys would give him more stories to tell about his country.

Links:

Bush Blitz

Lake Condah Sustainable Development Project

ABC Mission Voices: Lake Condah

Just like Melbourne loves to steal big sporting events, musicals and exhibitions from other Australian capital cities, now it seems we'd also steal a big fish!

For years I have been sitting in my office in the marine biology area of the museum discretely listening in to my office buddy’s phone calls. There is always something going on but this past week things have gotten more interesting than usual.

“...Another one? ... Where this time? ... Did they give you a photo?... Wow-ee!”

Apparently there have been a number of sightings of Blue Gropers in waters in and around Port Phillip Bay. Once a popular target for spearfishers in the mid 1900s, they are now considered one of the more elusive fish in our waters.

Eastern Blue Groper, Achoerodus viridis.
Image: Saspotato
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 from Saspotato

We are thought to have only the Eastern Blue Groper in Victoria (Achoerodus viridis), but that is where the mystery widens.

If the western sightings turn out to be the Western Blue Groper (Achoerodus gouldii), then that would be exciting, because even though some guide books list the species in western Victoria, the museum has no verified records that I could find. Effectively, it would be the first offical indication that we have of the Western Blue Groper extending its range from Western Australia and South Australia into Victorian waters.

Being passionate about all things mariney, I have listened to these recent phone calls more keenly than most because regardless of the exact species, Eastern or Western, they suggest that this iconic giant is back in significant numbers. Perhaps this means marine parks and sanctuaries are helping blue groper populations to increase.

Anyway, I’m heading out next weekend to get wet and see if I can further fuel the enthusiasm in here. Join me and get diving or snorkelling, if you see a groper emerge out of the bay haze, snap a photo and help us solve this mystery.

A male Eastern Blue Groper (Achoerodus viridis) escorted by juvenile Silver Trevally (Pseudocaranx dentex). Shelly Beach, Manly, NSW.
Image: Richard Ling
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 from rling

Oh and if you’re interested...

Blue Gropers are large, slow-growing fishes, that reach a metre or thereabouts – gentle giants if you like. They hang around rocky reefs. Funnily enough, their name is misleading because they are not always blue. Sometimes they are green, sometimes grey, sometimes inbetween. They start life as females and turn into males when about half a metre long, about a ten-year wait to manhood. They are more closely related to wrasses and parrotfishes than to the tropical groper commonly seen by divers on reefs in northern Australia. They are now more sought after for viewing on a spectacular dive rather than for dinner. Reef Watch Victoria monitors blue gropers and other marine life along our coasts.

Links:

Australian Museum Eastern Blue Groper video

Fishes of Australia's Southern Coast

Coastlinks Victoria - marine reserves, parks and sanctuaries

Priscilla is a Program Coordinator for Life Sciences and works on education programs at Melbourne Museum. She has been a regular dinosaur digger for over 10 years!

I'm often asked what it's like at a dinosaur dig. The romantic view most people have, fuelled by films like Jurassic Park, is that we simply sweep away the sand with a brush, use high-tech gadgets to locate the exact location of the bones, and get flown to tropical islands with Jeff Goldblum.

Over 100 years ago the first dinosaur fossil, the Cape Paterson Claw, was found on the coast of Victoria at a site known as Eagles Nest. Nothing much else was found until two young palaeontologists in the making, Tim Flannery and John Long, spent their youth searching the rocks along the coast of Victoria, eventually finding more fossil booty. Their finds have led to decades of dinosaur digs along the coast of Victoria.

From Cape Otway to Inverloch, the Cretaceous-aged sandstone rocks have been blasted, bashed and bored to reveal what life was like 120 million years ago in Victoria. Each year the work at the Dinosaur Dreaming Dig, which is a joint project between Museum Victoria and Monash University, recruits numerous volunteers who spend hours breaking rock. Over the years, the same volunteers return, making the whole experience more like a giant family gathering at Christmas. Uncle Norman, Mother Lesley, Sister Alanna, and Grandma Mary are all there. Gerry and his rock, Doris and her eggnog, Mike and his poems, Nick and his telescope, Nicole and her berry crumble are all part of the experience.

And yes, there are the dinosaur bones. Each year some 800 new bones are found and catalogued. Just like a Christmas stocking, you never know what you are going to find inside each rock  – will it be the discovery that changes theories of evolution or another disappointment? Yet despite so many fruitless ‘stocking openings’, I and many others are lured back. After so many years of digging, amazing fossils have been found. Many of these incredible specimens are now on display in 600 Million Years: Victoria evolves. Hopefully, this clip gives you some insight into just how we find them...

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Dinosaur Dreaming: the Inverloch Fossil Site infosheet

Fossil collecting sites in Victoria infosheet

Dinosaur Walk

Dinosaur Dreaming blog

Over the past ten years, MV curator Tim O’Hara has been snooping through museum collections all over the world, collecting data about brittle stars for a major mapping exercise. He compiled nearly 7000 samples from 250 common species of brittle stars from 24 different museums and discovered something quite unexpected about their distribution.

Brittle stars, or ophiuroids, are echinoderms closely related to sea stars. They have five long, flexible arms attached to a central body. Unlike sea stars, brittle stars are quite active and fast-moving. They are ideal for this kind of large-scale mapping study because they are found all over the globe in a variety of habitats.

A brittle star (Conocladus australis) from southern Australia wrapped around a whip-coral.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Biogeographers – scientists that study the patterns of distribution of life – have long observed that certain species are associated with particular environments. This makes sense; an animal has particular requirements of temperature, salinity, depth, food availability, and won’t survive where these conditions don’t exist. However in the deep-sea, environmental factors are not very variable - deep water is cold and dark everywhere. Correspondingly, it has been assumed that the fauna in the deep-sea won’t vary much, or at most, certain species would be confined to particular oceans.

It turns out this assumption is not necessarily true. Tim's brittle star study found that there are distinct bands of species distribution not only in shallow water environments, where conditions can be very variable and distinct, but in the deep-sea. Deep-sea brittle stars are found in the same latitudinal bands as their shallow-water relatives, and it’s not yet clear why.

Map showing the overlapping distribution of tropical, temperate and polar brittle stars.
Image: Tim O'Hara
Source: Museum Victoria

Tim thinks the pattern he's discovered might be related to the life history of brittle stars. As he explains, the distinct bands might be due to the way currents disperse larvae. “A lot of these animals have very yolky eggs and there’s a theory that in cold water, eggs go into suspended animation and float on the currents for perhaps a year. Some don’t need to feed – they have all the energy they need to go through metamorphosis to juvenile stage.”

A brittle star (Acanthophiothrix purpurea) on a coral, from Lizard Island Queenlsand.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

“It’s a funny strategy that an animal would just throw eggs into the current and hope for the best, but obviously it’s successful because they get around. We’re doing a lot of genetic work at the moment over this study area and we’re getting things that are almost identical 7000km apart.”

Tim’s study, co-authored by Ashley Rowden and Nicholas Bax, was published in Current Biology. This project was generated as part of the Marine Biodiversity Hub, a multi-institutional research program funded by the Australian Government’s Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities.

Links:

O'Hara,Timothy D., Ashley A. Rowden, Nicholas J. Bax. A Southern Hemisphere Bathyal Fauna Is Distributed in Latitudinal Bands, Current Biology, 8 February 2011 (Vol. 21, Issue 3, pp. 226-230)

Marine Biodiversity Hub

Discussion of this study elsewhere:

Deep-sea News

The Age: 'Scientists discover deep-sea creatures play in the same band'

Echinoblog

Every now and then, those of us who work at Melbourne Museum receive a polite but slightly troubling email:

"The Preparation Department needs to undertake work today that may generate some odours."

I can’t think of another workplace where stench warnings are a regular occurrence. They’re intriguing, too, because I always wonder what they’re doing down there in the basement.

Our skilled preparators do much as their name would suggest: they prepare things, from animal specimens for research collections to intricate models for display. Their job combines elements of biology, taxidermy, sculpture and painting and their work area is a den of creativity and practicality that is stocked with tools and equipment and art supplies.

In mid-December, a Gray’s Beaked Whale (Mesoplodon grayi) unfortunately was stranded at Portland and died. Given the rarity of this species, and MV’s strength in the study of whales, its skeleton is a valuable addition to our research collection. The preparators perform the somewhat gruesome but necessary task of cleaning the skeleton, and that’s where the odour comes in.

The Preparation Department's collection of rubber gloves - essential tools in this line of work.
Source: Museum Victoria

Preparator Steven Sparrey explained the facilities in which large specimens are prepared. The specimens are placed in a sequence of water baths in the ominously named ‘maceration tank’ which allows the animal’s soft tissues to loosen away naturally from the bones without damaging them. It’s not pretty and it doesn’t smell good. After this, the bones are given a soapy wash and dried thoroughly.

The sealed room that holds the maceration tank (at the back) and cleaning benches.
Source: Museum Victoria

Some astonishingly large vertebrae from the backbone of a whale were on the drying racks. These were prepared for the Melbourne Aquarium from another stranded animal. The bones were quite yellow and Steven explained that the stains are from the whale’s oils, and they would be bleached by the sun once they were properly dry.

Whale vertebrae in the drying racks.
Source: Museum Victoria

Shortly after that, he firmly suggested that we leave the area because the smell tends to cling to clothing. Needless to say, he doesn’t wear his work clothes home on the train. So there you have it – perhaps not one of the most glamourous jobs at the museum, but an essential task to maintain Victoria’s collection of our state's fauna.

Links:

Model-making for Dynamic Earth

Climate change and whale evolution

Fossil unlocks secrets to the origin of whales

In May, Dr Joanna Sumner, Manager of Genetic Resources, joined a trip to Ilkurlka in remote Western Australia to work with Indigenous people and the WA Department of Conservation to survey the wildlife of this desert region.

This guest post is by Charlotte Smith, Senior Curator, Public & Institutional Life, who is in Paris researching the John Twycross 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition Building Collection for an upcoming book. This collection comprises 175 exquisite decorative arts objects purchased by wealthy wool merchant John Twycross at the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition.

I thought my finds last Friday at the Archives Nationales de Paris were pretty impressive – floor plans of the French courts, showing where each exhibitor was located, with a key – but today things got even better. I uncovered a document titled Section des Beaux-Arts. Oeuvres vendues a Melbourne [translation: Fine Art Section. Artworks sold in Melbourne]. The document is a list of 47 artworks. It describes the artist, title of work, purchaser and purchase price. What is really exciting for my research is John Twycross is mentioned eight times!

A record of purchases from the French Court. Twycross is listed third from the top.
Image: C. Smith
Source: Museum Victoria

He spent £806, the equivalent to a little over $63,000 today. While we don't have these paintings in the Twycross Collection, knowing more of what John purchased at the exhibition is really exciting, and adds to our understanding of the scope of the collection he amassed at the 1880 Exhibition.

Accompanying documents describe how artworks could be purchased from the French Court; one had to go to the French Consulate office on Collins Street between 10 and 4 weekdays, where a clerk was always 'ready to give the prices asked for such paintings by the artists'.

The Eiffel Tower in Paris was built for the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. This was one in a series of World's Fairs that included the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition. The tradition of World's Fairs took off after the 1851 Great Exhibition in London.
Image: C. Smith
Source: Museum Victoria

Links

The Twycross Collection

The 1880 and 1888 International Exhibitions

Royal Exhibition Builidng: Site of two World Fairs

Jack the Satin Bowerbird is arguably the superstar resident of Melbourne Museum's Forest Gallery. His gleaming blue plumage is gorgeous. His skills in construction are unparalleled. He's a great collection manager. But could he also be an illusionist? 

Jack the Satin Bowerbird Ptilonorhynchus violaceus.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

Deakin University's John Endler reported a fascinating possibility in his recent paper in the journal Current Biology. His study of the bowers constructed by the Great Bowerbird, Ptilinorynchus nuchalis, suggests that these animals arrange the ornaments in their bowers in such a way to make themselves look bigger, and thus more impressive, when courting females.

The principle is the same as that in the Ames Room in our exhibition The Mind: Enter the Labyrinth. The distorted, forced persepctive tricks our brains into interpreting people at opposite ends of the room as being dramatically different in size.

Of course, we're not sure if bowerbirds see this illusion the same that we do. And no one has noticed any partiular pattern to Jack's set-dressing, but perhaps there's more to his collection of blue things than first thought!

Links:

Birds use optical illusions to get mates, New Scientist, 9 September 2010

An article in the Age today shared the good news that the rare leafy liverwort Pedinophyllum monoicum survived the Black Saturday bushfire disaster in tiny remnants of Yarra Ranges rainforest. It was discovered through the Rainforest Recovery Project which is revisiting sites that were sampled prior to the fires.

This sort of work is critical to our understanding about how ecosystems recover - or don't - from bushfire. MV Curator of Hepetology, Jane Melville, received an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant in June this year to continue her work on the ecology, demography and genetics of frogs in the Kinglake region. A surprising number and diversity of frogs survived the February 2009 fires.

This field site in Toolangi was badly affected by bushfire, yet yielded an adult frog previously caught in 2008. It is thought that frogs survived the fire by hiding in and around bodies of water like this dam.
Image: Bec Bray
Source: Museum Victoria

Frogs and liverworts share one characteristic that make them particularly important indicators: they are very sensitive to drying out. Neither would survive a direct fire front but  persist in unburnt pockets (or refugia) that offer protection. Long-term studies will monitor how the forests recover in coming years; since frogs are mobile, it is hoped that they will spread relatively quickly back into their former range. Rainforest plants generally aren't quite so responsive so we're very fortunate that this small, tender plant made it through the fires.

Links:

Media release from the Department of Sustainability and Environment

Type specimen of Pedinophyllum monoicum held at Te Papa Tongarewa

What is a liverwort? - Australian National Botanic Gardens