A museum heist 70 years ago is still causing a flutter in butterfly science today

Lepidopterist Michael Braby is sitting in his lab, peering at a photo of a butterfly specimen on his computer screen – just as he’s done countless times before.

He has no inkling that he’s about to discover Australia’s greatest taxonomic fraud.

But he has noticed something odd about this particular butterfly, a Flame Hairstreak.

He zooms in to take a closer look. And on the distinctive ‘flame’ of the butterfly, the scarlet patch on the dark brown hind wing, there it is: it looks like it’s been patched up with red paint.

Surely, he thinks, it can’t have been tampered with?

Associate Professor Braby, who is from the ANU Research School of Biology and the CSIRO, has spent 30-odd years researching butterflies and moths, so when alarm bells start ringing about this suspect-looking specimen, he follows up on it, calling his colleague.

“I thought it might have been an accident,” Braby says, reasoning that someone may have guiltily tried to fix a damaged wing.

But straight off the bat, his colleague Rod Eastwood makes a suggestion: it’s got to be connected with the Colin Wyatt Butterfly Heist of 1947.

The Colin Wyatt Butterfly Heist is a bizarre and fascinating story, and as Braby is about to discover, it started a flutter which is still impacting science today. 

The charismatic butterfly thief

Before we talk about modern day, let’s head back to 1942, when a British man named Colin Wyatt travelled to Australia to work in the Air Force, bringing his wife, Mary.

Wyatt was an Olympic champion ski-jumper, a military camouflager, an author, a yodeller, a painter, a keen naturalist and a butterfly collector. A renaissance man, if you will. In newspaper reports from the time he’s also often described as “charismatic” and “handsome”.

Braby, in retelling this tale, prefers the term “rogue”.

Wyatt used his charm and notoriety to gain access to Australia’s most extensive museum butterfly collections. To an obsessive collector like Wyatt, a rare butterfly is as valuable as a rare diamond. So, he conducted a heist – with gentlemanly flair.

Under the guise of updating a book on Australian butterflies, Wyatt was invited into the secret back rooms of museums, home to the most coveted specimens in insect collections.

He then simply strolled out of the museums with little tins full of butterflies in his pockets and under his hat. On Wyatt’s trip to Adelaide, it’s said that he even locked himself in the museum overnight to get the job done under the cover of darkness.

Over multiple visits during 1946, Wyatt smuggled approximately 3,000 butterfly specimens out of Australian museum collections.

Wyatt posted the stolen collection to his home in England, and soon flew back himself. This time he was returning without Mary; their marriage had disintegrated while in Australia. Miserable in his empty house, Wyatt threw himself into re-labelling all his stolen specimens with fictional collectors and locations, sometimes subbing in his own name.

Almost immediately, word spread through staff at the Australian museums that there were holes in their butterfly collections. The rarest, most difficult-to-find specimens had simply vanished.

Scotland Yard detectives were called in to investigate the case of the missing butterflies. After a year-long process, they eventually charged Wyatt, retrieved 1,600 of the priceless specimens and sent them back to Australia.

Wyatt pleaded guilty to the heist, although he claimed he wasn’t in his right mind after his recent divorce. The judge seemed to sympathise with this excuse. As TIME Magazine reported: “The judge let him off easy (a £100 fine); he understood ‘the distraction of your mind’ that had led Wyatt to a crime of passion.” Who knows what Mary thought.

The Australian curators were left with the job of painstakingly sorting the returned specimens back to their original archives.

An ominous yellow tag remains on each specimen to this day, saying, “Passed through C. W. Wyatt theft collection, 1946-1947,” as a reminder that there is a small element of doubt hanging around every specimen touched by Colin Wyatt.

Revealing a fake

Skip forward 72 years, and we’re back in Braby’s lab at the Australian National University (ANU). While there wasn’t one of those yellow tags on the Flame Hairstreak specimen, he was starting to agree with his colleague that it could be mixed up in the Wyatt case.

It fit that Wyatt, who’d exhibited his art in Australia, had the painting skills, as well as the means and motive, to forge a specimen from the Australian Museum’s collection. In 1946, this was the only known example of a Flame Hairstreak in the world. There’s no doubt it would have been on Wyatt’s wish-list.

Braby reasoned that Wyatt could have nicked the rare specimen, and then inserted the quite realistic fake he’d created in its place, so no one would suspect it was missing.

But in the meticulous world of taxonomy and museum collecting, calling out a fake is an extraordinary move to make. Braby needed proof.

Besides, to finish the scientific paper they were working on – revising the taxonomic status of this species of butterfly – Braby and Eastwood needed to examine the true original specimen, called a holotype.

A side-quest was born to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Braby travelled to Sydney to visit the museum, and to search the collection with his own eyes.

He came across one particular specimen that stood out as a very good candidate for the actual Flame Hairstreak holotype. It was in much better shape than the supposed holotype specimen he’d seen on his computer screen.

“It had a Wyatt Theft Collection label on it, a similar date in the 1940s, but it had a different location label,” Braby explains.

Here, I ask you to imagine a montage of a busy scientist zooming in on butterfly wings, investigating genetic analyses, comparing labels, illustrations and photographs, reading up on the travels of Colin Wyatt and butterfly collectors in the region, then sitting down to write copious notes.

Braby took the curator at the Australian Museum aside and explained what he’d found.

He pointed out that beyond the red painted wing, there were other dodgy differences that pointed to the specimen being faked. The black bands on the hind wing of the (alleged) fake weren’t the right orientation for a Flame Hairstreak, and the orange band was criss-crossed with black veins not apparent in the collector’s original drawings. 

In Wyatt’s memoirs detailing his butterfly-collecting adventures, you can trace exactly where he travelled and when, piecing together a vivid chronology of his collecting. But Braby found that the labels of these two specimens didn’t match with their collector’s supposed chronologies – that is, until he switched the labels.

Then it all made sense.

Wyatt never went to the remote Barrington Tops location that the Flame Hairstreak hailed from, but he did go to the Blue Mountains where he diarised his excitement of collecting multiple of another similar species, the Silky Hairstreak – a species that has black veins on the orange section of the wings.

“When I told the curator, he was stunned,” Braby says. “He was just shaking his head.”

Braby and Eastwood published a paper laying out their case, concluding that Wyatt stole the original Flame Hairstreak holotype for his private collection, then replaced it with a Silky Hairstreak specimen he’d collected and reared himself and carefully painted it as a fake, switching up the two genuine labels.

It was huge news: a fake had never been discovered in an Australian national insect collection before.

In their 2019 paper, Braby and Eastwood wrote: “Wyatt’s fraudulent and apparently unprecedented act in creating the fake holotype has gone unnoticed for 72 years and must surely rank as Australia’s greatest taxonomic fraud!”

To fan the flames, after this paper came out, yet another falsified butterfly specimen was found by a scientist called John Tennent from the London Natural History Museum in 2024. Tennent also attributed this to Wyatt’s misdeeds.

The butterfly effect

Like the judge in Wyatt’s trial back in 1947, some may wonder if nicking a bunch of dead butterflies is that big a deal. But this stuff really matters to science.

Wyatt stole from the public record, with no regard to how removing one-of-a-kind original specimens would derail the naming and classification of species going forward.

“It’s almost beyond words, what he’s done,” Braby says. “The museum institutions are the foundation of our taxonomy and nomenclature, and hence they really underpin our knowledge of biodiversity.”

Taxonomy is the universal language which forms the basis of all global biological systems. There’s a code of conduct you must follow when describing a species that’s new to science, and every step is crucial to ensure the record is accurate.

The code states that when you publish a paper naming a new species, you must present a holotype, as physical proof of the species.

“The idea behind having a holotype specimen is that there’s no doubt as to what the species actually looks like,” Braby explains.

Generations of scientists will refer back to the holotype again and again in their research, so the specimen needs to be publicly accessible.

“If you start tinkering with that, the fabric of taxonomy just falls apart.”

This is not to say that scientists don’t make mistakes. Scientists are people – fallible like the rest of us – but they keep each other to account. An integral part of the scientific method is scrutinising the work of your peers.

So if a name or taxonomic description is published that’s not in line with the code, the scientific community will almost always identify the issues and reject the invalid new species. That diligence is crucial if you want to be a good taxonomist.

But an honest mistake is very different to deliberate deceit, like Wyatt’s fake butterfly specimens. Finding errors becomes a lot harder when there’s no transparency, and when you can’t even trust the labels of a collection.

It creates lots of extra work, as Braby found on his detective detour, and it wastes time; time that’s precious when there’s so much to be done.

“In this age, we have two diametrically opposing issues: on the one hand, we’re losing biodiversity at a phenomenal rate and on the other hand, we’re discovering biodiversity on an unprecedented scale,” Braby says.

It’s a strange thing to find yourself in the middle of a stark biodiversity crisis, while technology and scientific innovation is opening the realms of discovery.

“So, if taxonomy is going to go leaps and bounds forward, we’ve got to get it right,” Braby says.

The heist might be history, but the future demands we put it right.

“We’ve got to learn from our mistakes and try not to repeat these things.”