Long-lost photos of extinct butterfly bandicoot found in museum storeroom

Australia Broadcast Center

26-07-2025

Rohan Long was sifting through century-old archives of an anatomy professor when he came across a curious series of black and white photos of landscapes and native mammals.
"They stood out to me because they were a bit older than most of the other objects that were there," Mr Long, curator of the University of Melbourne's Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology, said.
He recognised the photos were a continuation of a previously discovered series taken (or orchestrated) by the anatomist and naturalist Frederic Wood Jones in the 1920s.
But he had no idea just how significant these images were, especially two depicting bandicoots.
One was a side profile portrait of a living adult, the other a heavily painted-over photo of a juvenile nestled in a human hand.
Mr Long was perplexed by the species description written on the back of the frames by Professor Jones.
"He'd used a three-part scientific name [Perameles myosura notina]," Mr Long said.
"It just made it more confusing because that combination of names is not found anywhere today. So I really was completely stumped."
Mr Long sent the images to mammalogy curator Kenny Travouillon at the Western Australian Museum, who immediately realised they portrayed an extinct species of bandicoot he and a colleague described in 2018.
They named it the Nullarbor barred or butterfly bandicoot (Perameles papillon) due to the distinctive butterfly-shaped patch on its rump, Dr Travouillon said.
As well as showing the animal's ear markings and unique pattern of barred fur, one of the photos was also linked to a location: "Ooldea" in the Nullarbor region.
Mr Long, who'd always been fascinated by historically extinct species, was stoked to discover the only known photos of the animal.
With further digging, he came across another photo of the bandicoot hiding in plain sight, but misidentified.
It was first printed in a newspaper in 1924 but the original glass slide, which is kept at the South Australian Museum, was simply labelled "bandicoot".
"[The three images] are amazingly significant because they depict living representatives of a species that's now extinct," Mr Long said.
So what happened to the bandicoots in the photographs, and their species as a whole?
Delving into historical museum correspondence and the writings of Professor Jones provides some answers.
Professor Jones, an Englishman, taught human anatomy at the University of Adelaide in 1919.
He was also interested in the anatomy and ecology of Australian animals and wrote a series of influential books called The Mammals of South Australia.
Perameles myosura notina was referred to as a Nullarbor form of what was then thought to be one barred bandicoot species (now understood to be several) that lived from southern Western Australia to east of Adelaide.
But in the 1920s, when his books were published, this overarching species of barred bandicoots was seemingly restricted to the Nullarbor because of factors associated with European colonisation.
The professor, who was was concerned by Australia's staggering loss of mammals even by the 1920s, believed all barred bandicoots of southern Australia were about to be wiped out entirely.
So he tried breeding them.
"He had a shed at the University of Adelaide that was his little menagerie, and he used to breed marsupials and keep marsupials and other animals on the grounds," Mr Long said.
Live butterfly bandicoot specimens collected by traditional owners on the Nullarbor were given to the remote train station master at Ooldea Siding, who sent them to Adelaide.
"Often when you trace back to where that animal actually came from, it's been collected by an Aboriginal person," Mr Long said.
"And they were very rarely, if ever, acknowledged by name."
Many of the bandicoots didn't make it to Adelaide alive. They fought each other to death, Professor Jones wrote:
Although they are extremely gentle when kept as pets, they are desperately pugnacious among themselves.
On one occasion eight live specimens were sent from Ooldea. All eight were dead and almost devoid of hair when they arrived in Adelaide.
But in the bandicoot corpse pouches were four young, two males and two females from different litters. They also seemed to be dead, but were revived.
Unfortunately, when they were older, one female killed the other, then fatally injured her first breeding partner. When she had babies with the other male, she killed and ate most of them "even when they were grown to half their adult size", Professor Jones wrote.
Unlike other bandicoot species, butterfly bandicoot females are 20 per cent larger than males, Dr Travouillon said.
"So the females were making the decisions about the breeding rather than the males, and they were very, very aggressive compared to other species of bandicoots."
Mr Long believes the photographs were probably of the butterfly bandicoots raised by Professor Jones but none of the animals moved with him to Melbourne in 1930.
And just a few years later, the butterfly bandicoot was extinct.
Thirty-four mammal species are believed to have gone extinct since European colonisation in Australia.
And researchers didn't even know the butterfly bandicoot had disappeared until Dr Travouillon described it as a separate species after coming across specimens in museums around the world.
The butterfly bandicoot likely fell victim to foxes, which caused a wave of extinctions as the predator moved westward across Australia, Dr Travouillon said.
"They [butterfly bandicoots] should have gone extinct in 1910, but they managed to survive until the 1930s.
"And I suspect it's because [the species] is so much more aggressive and it's also got a very unusual way of escaping."
Professor Jones wrote that, when alarmed, the butterfly bandicoot would "pause, and then, in an instant, spring into the air and vanish in the most remarkable manner" instead of just speeding away like other species.
Dr Travouillon thinks this behaviour might have confused foxes, allowing the butterfly bandicoot to last longer than other small mammals in Australia.
One lesson from the loss of the butterfly bandicoot is the importance of examining museum specimens, according to Dr Travouillon.
By looking at collections around the world, scientists can discover still-living species in need of conservation help.
And even though the butterfly bandicoot is gone, knowing more about its life history could help with future rewilding efforts.
Genetic work has found the butterfly bandicoot branched off 3 million years ago from extinct desert bandicoots and still-living Shark Bay bandicoots (Perameles bougainville).
Dr Travouillon said species related to extinct animals could be introduced into areas the latter once lived to recover the ecosystem.
For instance, mammals that dig holes, such as bandicoots, play a vital role in sowing seeds.
"Once they're gone … there's no more holes where plant seeds can accumulate, and the seeds actually need that to germinate," Dr Travouillon said.
"So bringing back a [similar species] to do that job is really beneficial for the environment. It will help the plants to come back."
Mr Long believes people should see the rediscovered photos of the butterfly bandicoot as a reminder of what we stand to lose.
"It's worth remembering and getting to know these animals, even after their extinction," he said.
"Because it's part of a broader narrative, which is pretty important for us to be aware of in 2025.
"They're poorly known because they went extinct … they're gone because of the actions of the European colonists of Australia."
Mr Long's words echo the thoughts and sentiments of Professor Jones from his mammal handbooks 100 years ago:
Australia has a heritage for which it must accept responsibility.
It must be prepared to conserve the living, to collect and preserve the dead, and to make provision for the proper study of the fauna in all its aspects.