Latest from the AM Blog
Writing from the frontiers of science, culture and education, as well as all the latest news from the Museum.
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AMRI
Tears of the gods in a tube!
Anemones are among the most colourful and beautiful marine invertebrates ̶ their cousins, the tube anemones, are equally as spectacular but less well known. A recent study of AMRI collections has led to a revision of records from the southwest Pacific and the recognition of a new species.
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AMRI
How does a land snail become a threatened species?
September 7th, the day the last thylacine died in captivity in 1936, is National Threatened Species Day. Founded to raise awareness of Australia’s plants and animals at risk of extinction, it’s also the occasion of Australia’s Threatened Species Bake-off.
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AMRI
Triage for Australia's lizards and snakes
Which of Australia’s endangered species need our most urgent attention? This was the question facing a group of conservation biologists, including two scientists from the Australian Museum Research Institute, following the most recent round of Red Data Book assessments of our reptiles.
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AMRI
A tad mysterious: The identity of five fabulous funnel-mouthed tadpoles revealed
When it comes to surveying for rare and threatened frog species, it’s important to be able to identify the tadpoles too!
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AMRI
This month in Archaeology: When did dingoes first come to Australia?
For this month’s blog, we examine a paper recently published by Loukas Koungoulos and Melanie Fillios in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, in order to answer the question: when did dingoes first come to Australia?
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AMRI
Hopping to it: 200,000 frog records in three years of FrogID
With 200,000 recorded frog calls comes a lot of valuable information! With the help of citizen scientists, a small, 3 cm sized threatened Sydney frog is verified as the 200,000th record for Australian Museum’s national FrogID project.
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AMRI
The Leaf-litter Frog mystery in the Cardamom Mountains, Cambodia
Although Leaf-litter Frogs are found throughout the forests of Southeast Asia, only a single individual had been recorded in the Cardamom Mountains. This has now changed, with the scientific discovery of the Cardamom Leaf-Litter Frog, named in honour of Cambodian Herpetologist Thy Neang.
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AMRI
A new “type” of Pig-footed Bandicoot
The original description of the now extinct Australian Pig-footed Bandicoot was based on one specimen, since lost, from which the tail was missing. New research, from the Australian Museum and Western Australian Museum, has nominated a replacement…
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AMRI
Chasing endemic land snails on Lord Howe Island
Climbing high mountains, leaping out of boats, winching out of helicopters … we are prepared to do it all, and more, for endemic snails!
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AMRI
Worms under the hammer
Collected thousands of metres below the ocean surface off the coast of Eastern Australia, two new species of deep-sea worm have been discovered. Learn how an unusual auction helped scientists at the Australian Museum and the University Museum of Bergen name these worms.
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AMRI
Angels in disguise
Why do some fishes hybridize, while others don’t? A recent collaborative study with the University of Sydney, Australian Museum and University of Queensland, has asked this question of marine angelfishes. They found that hybridisation of these fishes is more widespread than previously thought.
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AMRI
This month in Archaeology: Three different early humans coexisted in South Africa … around 2 million years ago
A team of scientists, led by Prof Andy Herries, recently discovered three different hominin species—Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the earliest-known Homo erectus—lived in the same place at the same time.
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AMRI
Who am I? The larval sunfish mystery
Isn’t this the cutest fish you have ever seen? At only 2 mm in length, this larval sunfish is one of three species of Mola found in Australian waters. The question is: which one is it?
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AMRI
Prehistoric sea scorpions once terrorised Australia
A new study has revealed an unexpected diversity of fossil sea scorpions (distant cousins of modern-day scorpions) that once swam across Australia, between 390–436 million years ago.
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AMRI
Good news for one of the most threatened frogs in the world
No longer known from just a single mountain top: expeditions in the mountains of northern Vietnam discover new locations for a rare frog.
