The story of the most audacious serial heist in the history of Australia’s museums — and the British gentleman adventurer who pulled it off and got away with it — in 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 Australia’s most prestigious museums in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. Alarmingly, the missing insects included many priceless ‘holotypes’ — the 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Drawing on unpublished case files, dossiers, and private archives, The Butterfly Thief pieces together Wyatt’s enigmatic life story and his decades-long impact on the world of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?