Coloured, stylised map of the de Vlamingh map

22 Oct 2013

The de Vlamingh plate

A detailed examination of the plate at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne revealed the hidden nature of this weather-ravaged historic pewter plate found at Cape Inscription.

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Western Australian Museum

Polyzosteria cuprea - a beautiful native cockroach

21 Oct 2013

Creature feature - Polyzosteria cuprea

Meet Polyzosteria cuprea Saussure, 1863! This native cockroach is endemic to south-western Australia and belongs to a genus of large, wingless and stunningly coloured (by cockroachy standards..) cockroaches found predominantly across southern Australia.

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Niki Comparti

Moving the megamouth shark from its old storage tank

23 Jul 2013

The megamouth results are in!

Back in early June we needed to weigh our iconic megamouth shark to test how effective the glycerol solution conservation technique had been in restoring mass to our megamouth shark.

At the time, we ran a contest to see who could guess how large the weight gain would be.

We can now confirm that Megamouth has gained just under 30% of its original mass through the conservation process, and Jahmila Parthenay - you are our winner! Jahmila entered via Facebook and was the closest of our 21 guesses.

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Western Australian Museum

A steel toy car

9 Jul 2013

The toys are coming out to play

The Western Australian Museum has a nationally significant collection of 24,000 items that is reflective of Western Australian childhood in all its diversity. The collection was donated to the WA Museum in 2009 by Edith Cowan University and has been in storage since.

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Western Australian Museum

Close up photo of a sunfish's mouth

21 Jun 2013

Sunny the Sunfish

Ocean Sunfish Mola mola (Linnaeus, 1758)

This magnificent Ocean Sunfish (nicknamed ‘Sunny’ due to the sunglasses used for scale in the photo) was washed up at Jay’s Beach in Augusta in August 2010.  This individual is a juvenile by sunfish standards, at around 1.5m nose to tail and 2.2m between fin tips, as they can reach over 4m in length and over 2,000kg.

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Western Australian Museum

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