Burramys and the historical reconstruction of zoological etymology
Open accessAbstract
The marsupial genus Burramys (Burramyidae: Diprotodontia) was established by Robert Broom in 1895 from fossil material recovered near Wombeyan Caves, New South Wales, Australia. Broom stated that Burramys was formed from ‘Burra’, ‘the Aboriginal name for the district’ where the fossils were found. Decades later, Troughton asserted that ‘Burra Burra’ meant a place of ‘many very large stones’, an interpretation subsequently repeated in popular and scientific accounts of the Mountain Pygmy-possum Burramys parvus. Historical review identified no primary linguistic or locally attributable evidence supporting this meaning for the Wombeyan–Taralga district. Broom’s original explanation is best understood as geographical rather than descriptive, while the later ‘very large stones’ interpretation appears to have entered the literature through repetition rather than primary linguistic verification.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 6
- Authors
- Harris, J. M., Troy, J. F., & Jackson, S. M.
- Affiliations
- Southern Cross University (AU)
- The University of Sydney (AU)
- Smithsonian Institution (US)
- Venue
- Australian Zoologist
- Publisher
- CSIRO Publishing
- Published
- 2026-10-13
- Volume
- 45
- Issue
- 3
- ISSN
- 0067-2238 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W7221625240
- Cited by
- 0
- References
- 6
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Australian Zoologist (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Australian Indigenous Culture and History
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › History of Science and Natural History
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant Science › Linguistic and Cultural Studies
- Keywords
- burramys, Burramys parvus, mountain pygmy possum, zoological nomenclature, etymology, Diprotodontia, marsupials, historical reconstruction
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
