‘It’s like looking at ghosts’: inside the Australian Museum’s extinction cabinets

The remains of a pig-footed bandicoot (Chaeropus ecaudatus) in Sydney’s Australia Museum, one of the 39 mammal species wiped out since Europeans invaded Australia. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

At the far end of one of the mammal rooms in the maze of offices and labs behind the Australian Museum in Sydney stand two anonymous grey metal cabinets. Although there is nothing to distinguish them from the storage units elsewhere in the room, they are freighted with particular significance.

These cupboards, known within the museum as the “extinction cabinets”, contain specimens of 24 of the 39 mammal species that have been wiped out since Europeans invaded Australia. They hold an index of loss stretching back almost 240 years.