Listen to Professor Peter Dearden talk to Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand Saturday Morning on Peripatus, an ancient and fascinating native nocturnal crawling creature.
Earlier in March 2023, in an Otago University fridge, a group of peripatus (aka velvet worms or ngāokeoke) had babies. Celebrating the birth was Professor Dearden, director of Genomics Aotearoa.
Peter is particularly interested in sequencing their genome as they are akin to living fossils, having survived over 500 million years virtually unchanged.