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5 unusual facts about Australian Museum


Charles Hedley

In April 1891 he joined the Australian Museum staff as assistant in charge of land shells, and about five years later was appointed conchologist.

Francis Day

One outcome of this professional friction resulted in Day's selling an extensive collection of fishes to the Australian Museum in 1883, ignoring the British Museum, the expected recipient.

Michael Lund

Australian Museum Eureka Prizes - Best Coverage of Research and Technology - Finalist (2004)

Mount Ritchie

Named by the Victoria University of Wellington Antarctic Expedition (VUWAE), 1970-71, after A. Ritchie, curator of fossils at the Australian Museum, Sydney, a member of the VUWAE party that discovered important sites of fossil fish in this Skelton Neve area.

Rhacophorus vampyrus

The first specimen was discovered in 2008 by Jodi Rowley of the Australian Museum at Sydney, Australia, and her student Le Thi Thuy Duong from Ho Chi Minh City University of Science.


Gerard Krefft

Krefft arrived in Sydney, New South Wales in 1860 and was appointed Assistant Curator of the Australian Museum on the recommendation of Governor Sir William Denison.

Henry Burrell

He was a corresponding member of the Zoological Society of London and of the Australian Museum, and a fellow of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales amongst other memberships of learned societies; he collected specimens for the University of Sydney and the Commonwealth government.

James Charles Cox

He became an assistant to Professor John Smith, the foundation professor of chemistry and experimental physics at the University of Sydney at its original site near Hyde Park, now occupied by Sydney Grammar School and established what became the Sydney Museum next door.

James Edge Partington

Before he died on 4 November 1930, his extensive collections and library were donated to the British, Australian, and Auckland museums.

Leonard Clarke Webster

Between 1903 and 1938, he sold plant and reptile specimens to the British Museum and the Australian Museum.


see also

Charles Hedley

He had become assistant curator of the Australian museum in 1908 and in 1920 he succeeded Robert Etheridge, Junior as principal keeper of collections.

Edgar Ravenswood Waite

Waite accompanied Charles Hedley of the Australian Museum on the 1896 Funafuti Coral Reef Boring Expedition of the Royal Society under Professor William Sollas and Professor Edgeworth David.

Slender sawtail catshark

Leonard Compagno and John Stevens described the slender sawtail catshark in a 1993 issue of the scientific journal Records of the Australian Museum.