The Butterfly Thief

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The story of the most audacious serial heist in the history of Australias museumsand the British gentleman adventurer who pulled it off and got away with itin a scientific true-crime caper stretching around the globe.

In January 1947, a chance discovery rocked the world of natural science: over 3,000 rare and precious specimens of butterflies had vanished from Australias most prestigious museums in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. Alarmingly, the missing insects included many priceless holotypesthe first specimen of a given species to be identified, against which all others are compared.

On the other side of the world, New Scotland Yard descended on a country house in Surrey, where they found a trove of over 40,000 butterfly specimens. The culprit was Colin Wyatt, a Cambridge-educated ski champion, mountaineer, wartime camouflager, artist, and amateur naturalist whose high-flying exploits cut a path from the Alps of Europe to a London court room to a final expedition to the jungles of Guatemala.

Drawing on unpublished casefiles, dossiers, and private archives, The Butterfly Thief pieces together Wyatts enigmatic life story and his decades-long impact on the world of natural history. Along the way, award-winning journalist Walter Marsh reveals a deeper history of gentleman explorers, scoundrels, and grave-robbers that begs an uncomfortable but vital question: What if Western museums were crime scenes all along?