The scientists of the Australian Museum Research Institute are hard at work investigating the world’s biodiversity – which sometimes means discovering animals not previously known to science. These discoveries teach us what has come before us, and what we need to protect for the generations that will come after us.  

In the final episode of Explore we head out into the field – from the deepest ocean trenches to the peaks of the Himalayas – to discover how the Australian Museum’s Chief Scientist Professor Kris Helgen and palaeontologist Patrick Smith identify new species, and what it means to add new branches to the Tree of Life.  

Guests: Professor Kris Helgen, Dr Patrick Smith, Dr Tim O’Hara and the scientists aboard the CSIRO RV Investigator

Host: Alice Gage

Find images, extra stories and transcript at australian.museum/explore

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Professor Kristofer M. Helgen is Chief Scientist and Director of the Australian Museum Research Institute. He is responsible for a team of more than 100 staff, including research scientists, collection scientists, collection officers and more than 130 associates, fellows and students, who research and explore the natural world. Kris was most recently Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Adelaide. He has focused his research primarily on fieldwork with living animals and research in museum collections to document the richness of life, understand global change, and contribute to important problems in biomedicine. Originally from Minnesota, Kris gained his undergraduate degree in Biology at Harvard University and his Ph.D. in Zoology as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

Dr Patrick Smith is a technical officer in the Palaeontology Collection at the Australian Museum Research Institute. He obtained a PhD at Macquarie University looking at Middle Cambrian (500–510 million year old) marine invertebrates from Ross River Gorge near Alice Springs in central Australia. He also was a previous curator at the Richmond Marine Fossil Museum (Kronosaurus Korner) in far northwest Queensland and a technical officer in the geology department at the University of New South Wales. Currently he is working to database the Australian Museum’s entire Palaeontology Collection. This includes all the material onsite, as well as the material at the museum offsite storage facility. 

Dr Tim O'Hara is the Senior Curator, Marine Zoology, at Museums Victoria. He uses museum collections to answer large-scale questions about the distribution of seafloor animals around the globe. This research includes aspects of biogeography, macroecology, phylogeny, and phylogeography. Tim's taxonomic speciality is the Ophiurodea (brittle-stars), a class of echinoderms that are a dominant component of the seafloor fauna. 

Alice Gage is the producer, writer and host of the Australian Museum’s Explore podcast, and editor of Explore, its biannual magazine. Alice is an editor, writer and content creator interested in the nexus of science, cultural knowledge and art. She founded and published cult art journal Ampersand Magazine from 2009-2013. Alice lives on Bidjigal Country with her husband and their two little redheads. She holds an MA in Communications from Melbourne University and a BA in English from Sydney University.  

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