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The specimen was deceased when the senior man discovered it, lying in the snow 1,600 meters over sea level. It didn't have a title at that time, as he bent down and collected its form up from the ice – a tiny unidentified, airy as a feather, scarcely discernible to an unpracticed eye. But this incident in the time of 1922 was not his earliest encounter with the brief existence of an insect. It was not his earliest trip on the plateau as well, a volcanic upland located high in the Great Dividing Range of the state.

The Man Known as Hopson

The individual's name was J. Hopson but to many he was referred to as the “Patriarch of the Highlands”. It was well known that the upland was excellent insect land; if you picked your opportunity appropriately, the alpine air would be heavy with them, collecting at dusk in misty groups ripe for a person like the collector to trap hundreds at a time with a pass of a trap. Or, as in this instance, a cold snap or sudden snow might cause the ground littered with fine corpses, resting in full view for a keen-eyed hobbyist. The insects were just the commencement of its wealth and, once information began to propagate of this “nature's paradise”, enthusiasts swarmed like moths to a fire.

The man was there to lead the pioneering scientific mission in 1915 and subsequent waves of polite academics, wet-eared college students and enthusiastic hobbyists who hiked up the hazy hillsides with their traps and containers.

The Passing and Inheritance of the Collector

Then, in the sixth month 1928, the collector keeled over deceased at the years of 60. The story of his specimen didn't end there. Most of the 3,000-odd insects he'd collected were left to the Australian Museum in the metropolis but that little specimen from the frozen terrain had moved into the care and collection of the man's companion and the country's leading insect hobbyist, Dr Gustavus Athol Waterhouse.

Completing the work of other enthusiasts, even if they were living or gone, acquaintance or unfamiliar, was not unusual for Waterhouse and he started identifying the body. As he examined at its appendages he saw vibrant red markings on the soft white bottom, telling him this was an unknown.

The expert called it Pseudalmenus chlorinda barringtonensis. Following generations of researchers would bestow upon it a considerably catchier nickname – the fiery streak.

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A Contemporary Finding

Nearlyearly 90 years later, in 2016, an communication appeared into the mailbox of an university researcher, Braby, with an atypical file. It was a picture of a fiery streak, reportedly the one Hopson found deceased in the snow. Due to the expert, that example had evolved into a “reference specimen” – the first of its sort to be obtained and classified, and held by the institution since the 1930s.

As with the collector, scientists such as the researcher often follow the path of generations of long-gone enthusiasts whose life's works now reside in museum cabinets.

In certain instances, the scientist has utilized samples from the Victorian era to examine species that now confront an unpredictable destiny. “They truly underpin our understanding of biodiversity – they are the cornerstones, the mainstays, if you prefer,” Braby informed. “So once you start compromising that … yeah, it’s not good.”

For the researcher, P barringtonensis and its connected types were of “significant preservation concern” as they are particularly susceptible to swift natural disruption.

But, as he looked closer, the researcher realised that the signature scarlet patterns of this “flame hairstreak” had been set out not through countless of years of development but a extremely fine brush.

“It’d been altered,” he said. The butterfly was a counterfeit, a similar species dyed to resemble its rarer relative. “I’d never encountered that before.”

The Inquiry Commences

I had been employed at the South Australian Museum for less than a seven days when a coworker told me about the scientist's finding and how it linked to a bizarre string of burglaries that had shaken the institution community above 70 years earlier.

The inquiry started in the first month 1947 in the lower level of the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, when an scientist known as Alec Burns made a “chance” finding.

The scientist had spotted a few empty spaces in a compartment of colorful large insects. That few of spaces quickly expanded to above 800 missing samples and, within a fortnight, over 3,000 uncommon and valuable examples had been stated lost from Australia's top public galleries in Sydney and Adelaide.

Staff realized nearly immediately that this was deliberate. It was a methodical ongoing theft, and a violating action against the actual notion of a gallery its essence – by a person who knew their path around one.