Te Papa: discovery centre

Location: Te Papa Museum

Gallery: discovery centre

while wandering through the te papa's very confusing interior i made a very exciting discovery... the discovery centre.

every good museum has a discovery centre. the trick is sometimes you can gauge HOW good a good museum is by its discovery centre.

let me tell you te papa ranks up there with the greats based on what i'm seeing in this discovery centre!

it's got everything from cool modern (or in science wording extant) animals and plants on display, to extinct ones!


one of my favourite things in it was the microbe-scope by the front door. now we have a microbe-scope at the otago museum, but this one was much nicer to be fair. ours is only an eye piece dealyo, this one broad casted what you were looking at onto a fancy TV screen!

there was a lot of neat stuff (sadly i neglected to take a lot of pictures), but the thing that for some reason caught my eye was of course the fossils...

they were all casts in here, but for the first few hours (till i FINALLY found the geology hall) they were the only signs of prehistoric life i'd seen (apart from fairly geologically recent things on display in the blood earth fire exhibit).

including the first dinosaurs of the north island i saw!... of course these were only harmless (in the sense of my rarity as a dinosaur in new zealand still being intact) toys.
they had some very neat cast specimens of other prehistoric critters like icthyosaurs and sail backs...
my favourites which you just don't actually see on display enough was the dodo and...

a coelacanth model.

sadly i didn't have much time to fully explore or try the many excellent and fun hands on activities here, but if you're in wellington give them a shot!