A strange skull from the Lower Murrumbidgee became a possible bunyip specimen, a subject of anatomical disagreement and a public attraction in Sydney in 1847. Its unusual outline invited comparison with an unknown animal, but the surviving scientific descriptions increasingly pointed towards a malformed young horse. The specimen later disappeared from the documented museum trail. This case concerns that particular skull and the evidence recorded about it; an anatomical conclusion about one object does not settle the meaning or validity of every Indigenous tradition associated with the name bunyip.
A specimen moves between colonies
The most direct surviving descriptions are Ronald Campbell Gunn’s account, including a report by Dr James Grant, and William Sharp Macleay’s subsequent letter. Both appear in volume III of the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science, whose collected title page is dated 1849. Gunn’s paper occupies printed pages 147–149; Macleay’s letter appears on pages 275–278. The latter is dated Elizabeth Bay, 5 July 1847. These are accounts by people who examined the object, rather than descriptions assembled solely from later monster stories.
Gunn said Athol Fletcher had brought a skull from the Murrumbidgee to Melbourne. No other bones accompanied it. Edward Curr obtained the loan of the specimen and sent it to Gunn in Launceston, where Gunn asked Grant to examine it. Gunn acknowledged that his information about the discovery came through letters from Curr and Charles Joseph La Trobe. That information chain matters: Gunn could describe his access to the object directly, while depending upon other people for what had happened at the river.
Dates that do not fit neatly together
The primary publication contains a real chronological difficulty. Gunn refers to a discovery in the preceding January and signs his account at Launceston on 20 February 1847. The embedded Grant letter, however, is printed as 19 February 1846. Inspection of the scanned page confirms that the final digit is printed that way; it is not merely an error introduced by searchable text. The issue wrapper says January 1847, while an editorial footnote explains that publication had been delayed.
Macleay offers another important detail: an inscription on the skull stated that Fletcher had found it in 1846 on the Lower Murrumbidgee. These dates should not be forced into a precise discovery day by silently correcting a source. The broad 1846–47 history is well represented, but the original accounts themselves require comparison. Nor should the collected volume’s 1849 title-page date be mistaken for the date on which the examinations occurred. Dates of discovery, correspondence, issue labelling and collected publication are different pieces of the record.
What Grant actually found
Grant recognised the skull as belonging to a very young animal, possibly a foetus. He did not treat unfamiliarity as sufficient proof of a new species. Instead, he asked how much of its peculiar appearance might result from incomplete development. A young camel had been suggested, and he mentioned that possibility without establishing it. His more definite conclusion concerned diet: the remains belonged to a large plant-eating animal. That already sat uneasily beside descriptions of an aquatic creature attacking people.
The skull’s bones were thin, smooth and partly unossified. Its two sides were asymmetrical, and the braincase appeared disproportionately developed compared with the face. The teeth had been covered by a membrane, which Grant removed to prepare his drawings. He described three substantial molars and noted damage that prevented him from being certain about the front teeth. The missing lower jaw and broken portions were limitations on identification, rather than features to fill in from an imagined complete animal.
Grant supplied measurements and three views, reproduced as plates III, IV and V. The skull’s recorded length was eleven inches. His discussion connected individual labels in the drawings with teeth, bones and membrane-covered spaces, allowing another anatomist to inspect the reasoning rather than simply accept a verdict. The accompanying image is the historical side-view plate associated with this report. It is an anatomical illustration of the disputed specimen, not a picture of a living bunyip.
Macleay’s comparison with a different skull
By July 1847, Curr had sent the specimen to the Speaker of the Legislative Council, who placed it in Macleay’s hands. Macleay described an incomplete skull, partly patched together, without a lower jaw or the front portion carrying the upper incisors. Membranes and ligaments remained attached. Its condition therefore indicated recent remains, rather than a fossil from an ancient animal. He also recorded damage and marks of gnawing around the missing upper part.
His strongest anatomical argument concerned the teeth. He identified the three milk molars on each side as those of a young foal, pointing to the shape of their crowns as a character separating horses from ruminants. Other parts of the jaw and face supported that comparison. He acknowledged that some proportions were extraordinary and that parts of the skull suggested a llama or another member of the camel group. His conclusion depended on weighing those conflicting features, not on denying that the skull looked unusual.
Macleay then compared it with a foetal mare’s skull from the Hawkesbury River in 1841. That was a different object already in his possession. In the Hawkesbury specimen, the eye sockets converged into one central opening. In the Murrumbidgee skull, their separation was exceptionally wide. Macleay argued that these opposite abnormalities could both occur within the horse. He was consequently inclined to identify the Murrumbidgee specimen as another malformed foal, rather than an unknown aquatic species.
His letter still considered a conditional alternative: even if the skull eventually proved to represent a distinct species, its anatomy would place it close to horses, not establish the water-dwelling creature described in popular accounts. He then restated his judgement that it was not new. That sequence preserves the difference between considering a possibility and adopting it. The editor explicitly identified Macleay’s specimen as the same skull previously discussed in Grant’s report, preventing the two examinations from becoming separate discoveries in later retellings.
Exhibition and the later museum trail
Julian Holland’s On the Trail of a Bunyip, published in Australian Natural History in summer 1990–91, reconstructs the public exhibition and later debate. He dates the Australian Museum display to 7–8 July 1847, reproduces the invitation to view the supposed specimen and stresses that surviving records do not establish how many visitors attended. His discovery chronology places the find in October 1846 or earlier. That is a later reconstruction, distinguishable from Gunn’s January wording and the inscription described by Macleay.
A further development appears in The Bunyip in Balranald, in Muse, June 2018. Uncle Daniel Kelly, a Mutthi/Wemba elder, and history graduate Therese Apolonio describe research into the skull. The account reports a trail through the editors of the Australian Medical Journal in August 1847 and then to an unnamed museum in Port Phillip. They did not locate the famous specimen. The surviving Hawkesbury horse skull and skin in the Macleay collection were explicitly distinguished from it.
Kelly’s contribution also explains the bunyip’s importance in Mutthi Mutthi culture and childhood teachings about dangerous deep river water. That perspective has a different purpose from the colonial anatomists’ attempt to classify a skull. The museum discussion brings those histories together without making them interchangeable. Its proposed transfer trail is a lead reported by the researchers, not proof of the skull’s present whereabouts. The surviving documents permit a well-supported account of an anatomical dispute, while the missing object limits modern re-examination. For another Australian case involving an alleged unusual animal and a preserved specimen, see the Tantanoola tiger.
The map pin is an approximate Balranald town reference for the Lower Murrumbidgee discussion and the later Balranald research, rounded from Bureau of Meteorology station coordinates. It does not identify the skull’s unverified discovery spot or its present whereabouts. Its subsequent examination in Melbourne, Launceston and Sydney occurred elsewhere.