The 1847 Australian Museum “Bunyip Skull”

Record summary

In 1847 the Australian Museum displayed a skull reported as belonging to a bunyip, after a specimen was associated with Aboriginal accounts and a Murray River discovery. Contemporary discussion treated it as a potentially unknown animal, while later examination identified it as a distorted or misidentified mammalian skull, commonly described as a horse or another familiar species. The episode matters because it shows how Indigenous water-being traditions, colonial collecting, newspaper sensationalism and comparative anatomy became entangled. The specimen’s exact chain of custody and early descriptions require checking against museum and newspaper records.