Scientists are still unravelling the thefts of Colin Wyatt, an English adventurer, artist and naturalist who charmed the entomological community. The investigation began in January 1947 in the basement of the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, when an entomologist named Alec Burns made a 'fluke' discovery. Burns had spotted three empty spaces in a drawer of green-and-gold birdwing butterflies. That handful of gaps soon grew to more than 800 missing specimens and, within a fortnight, more than 3,000 rare and precious specimens had been reported missing from Australia's most prestigious state museums in Sydney and Adelaide.
Nearly 90 years later, in 2016, an email pinged into the inbox of an Australian National University scientist, Dr Michael Braby, with an unusual attachment. It was a photograph of a flame hairstreak, supposedly the one Hopson found dead in the snow. Thanks to Waterhouse, that specimen had become a 'holotype' – the first of its kind to be collected and named, and held by the Australian Museum since the 1930s. But, as he looked closer, Braby realised that the signature red markings of this 'flame hairstreak' had been set out not by millions of years of evolution but a very thin paintbrush. 'It'd been touched up,' he said. The butterfly was a fake, a closely related species painted to look like its rarer cousin. 'I'd never come across that before.'
The butterfly was dead when the old man found it, lying in the snow 1,600 metres above sea level. It didn't have a name then, as he bent down and scooped its body up from the ice – a tiny John Doe, light as a feather, barely visible to an untrained eye. But this encounter in the spring of 1922 wasn't his first brush with the short life cycle of an insect. It wasn't his first time on Barrington Tops either, a volcanic plateau perched high in the Great Dividing Range of New South Wales. The man's name was Johnny Hopson but to many he was known as the 'Father of the Tops'.
