Leslie Adkin wore a lot of hats: photographer, farmer, pioneering tramper, husband and father, self-taught geologist, anthropologist. But it’s his pictures that have had the broadest impact. His ...

A fossilised bone found in a Canterbury stream turns out to be from a nothosaur—the first proof that these massive, predatory marine reptiles ever lived in the southern hemisphere. Nothosaurs could ...

Wellington journalist Michelle Duff tackles the big stuff: racism, sexual abuse, the deep, dangerous inequities ambient in our education and health systems. What this means is that she has spent 15 ...

That isn’t a cheerful bonfire, it’s a massive cleanup operation. In Tairāwhiti the beaches are smothered in dead wood. Mountains are sliding into rivers; forests swarm with possums. While officials ...

The plant can regrow from just a tiny fragment, and splotches the canopy yellow as it smothers the host trees. At the northern edge of Hakupu Village, on the small Pacific island of Niue, a signpost ...

At the Hutt Valley Tramping Club a couple of dozen people sit around a table, tiny trees and cups of tea plopped before them. The cedar smell is heavenly. “Like Christmas and sweat,” somebody says.

In May, a single white-tipped huia feather sold at Webb’s auction house in Auckland for $46,521—an astonishing sum that seems to reflect both our fascination with artefacts of extinction and the ...

Climate change will help one of the most pernicious pest birds in the country spread south, a new study has found—and reports from Christchurch suggest it’s already happening. Common mynas, native to ...

A mycologist on a mission to catalogue all New Zealand’s species of rust has just added another 26 to the list. For Eric McKenzie, the fungal pathogens have been a 55-year passion. Some specimens have ...

New Year’s Day, 1967. North of Auckland, marine biologist Bill Ballantine decides he’ll kick off the year by taking the temperature of the sea. This is how one of the longest ocean-temperature records ...

The autopsy was clear. Frederick George Walker and Kevin James Speight, two “sly groggers” running a clandestine speakeasy, had been executed. Their bodies were riddled with .45 calibre slugs fired ...

Off the warming northeastern coasts of New Zealand, a spiky problem is snowballing. Centrostephanus rodgersii, the longspined sea urchin, is a native species, but the comparatively balmy winters ...