The Murrumbidgee bunyip skull (Balranald, 1846)

In the 1840s the Australian colonies were full of talk of the bunyip. In 1845 the Geelong Advertiser had reported fossil bones linked to the creature, along with Aboriginal descriptions of it. A strange head from the Hawkesbury, dated 1841, was already known. The question hung in the air. Was the bunyip real?

January 1846. The banks of the Murrumbidgee River, near Balranald in New South Wales. A squatter found a skull. The scholar Penny Edmonds names him as Athol T. Fletcher. Other accounts leave him nameless.

He showed it around. In his words, "all the natives to whom it was shown called [it] a bunyip." Early reports described it as the skull of something unknown to science. Some later retellings put the find a year on, in January 1847. The exact spot was never recorded.

On 23 January 1847 the Sydney Chronicle ran a piece headed "The Bunyip, or Kine Pratie". The explorer William Hovell, of Hume and Hovell, examined the skull. His letter, "The Apocryphal Animal of the Interior of New South Wales", appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 9 February 1847. He recorded another name for the creature, katen-pai. He wrote of rumours of "a huge animal of the fere order" living in "the lakes and rivers of the interior".

A drawing of the skull, credited to Henry Dowling and John Murray and dated January 1847, appeared in The Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science. It is the only image of the specimen known today.

July 1847. The skull went on display for two days at the Colonial Museum of Sydney, now the Australian Museum. Visitors came in large numbers. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that many people came forward with bunyip sightings of their own.

On 7 July 1847 the naturalist William Sharp Macleay published "On the Skull Now Exhibited at the Colonial Museum of Sydney" in the Sydney Morning Herald. He compared it with the earlier Hawkesbury skull. His conclusion, as Edmonds summarises it, was that it was "likewise the misshapen foetus of a mare". Professor Richard Owen was among the experts who identified it as the foetus of a foal or calf.

Most later accounts follow that explanation. No source accuses the finder of a hoax. The fraud claims belong to the Hawkesbury head, which Edmonds describes as "a clever admixture of fur, horse-bone and plaster". The two are often confused. They are separate records.

The Murrumbidgee skull did not survive. In Edmonds' words, "it has since become lost." Popular retellings say it was stolen or simply disappeared from the museum. Nothing confirms either story. The 1847 drawing is what remains.

The skull arrived while naturalists still took the bunyip seriously. In 1849 Ronald Gunn wrote in the Tasmanian journal that "every effort is now making" to obtain a living bunyip or settle whether it was fabulous. This specimen did not settle it. But for two days in July 1847, Sydney came to look a legend in the eye. Robert and Nicholas Holden retold the story in Bunyips: Australia's Folklore of Fear, and Edmonds returned to it in 2018.