The palaeobotany specialist with the recently donated 35-million-year-old Tetleyi fossil.

Go to the Waiheke Historical Society membership meeting these days and it's likely that gramophone recordings, played through an iPod, will be playing as background music.

On the agenda might be lively debate on details for the island-wide scavenger hunt that the committee is planning for Heritage Week in September; discussion of a new professional collection policy that concentrates specifically on Waiheke history; or digitised archiving.

Talk might then veer on how to set up a recently acquired pair of ships' telegraphs as an interactive display.

However, perhaps the most dynamic acquisition at the museum this year is paleobiology secialist Ilona Weyers, although the feisty German/American is quick to point out that the museum's whole committee is now a useful mix of new and very long-time members.

She, with her husband Mike Trick and son Alexander, who is now a regular face in Oneroa's village community, arrived in New Zealand in January for Professor Trick's Hood Fellowship at the University of Auckland Faculty of Engineering.

A prominent Operations Research specialist, he is Professor of Operations Research at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, and a well-known researcher and educator in operations research, the science of making better decisions.