Early Encounters

"For at least 40 000 years, Australia has been inhabited by Aborigines who have a profound knowledge of the natural world. To the Aborigines, reptiles not only provide a food source but figured largely in their myths, religion and totemic beliefs.

In 1933 Dr Donald Thomson published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London a report that noted: 'The name "Taipan" by which O. scutellatus is known to the Aborigines of Cape York Peninsula, is an excellent vernacular name for the species. The natives hold the Taipan in great dread, and it appears to have been responsible for many deaths among them'. On Cape York Peninsula they would respond, 'plenty bad fella' when questioned about the Taipan.

In Aboriginal myths, 'Rainbow Snake' is the name given to a gigantic serpent whose body arches across the sky as the rainbow. This mythical snake is known as Taipan among the Wikmunkan people and this name was later given to a living snake.

It was Donald Thomson who introduced the Wikmunkan (western Cape York Peninsula Aboriginal community) name 'Taipan' into general use. The naturalist Eric Worrell was later to point out that 'Taipan' is also an Asian word meaning 'the boss' or 'master', a person of high authority.

History and Discovery
Between 1864 and 1866 a German Lady by the name Amalie Dietriech collected a Coastal Taipan from the Rockhampton region and sent it back to the Gedeffroy Museum in Hamburg. This snake was later classified as Pseudechis scutellatus (same genus as the Australian Black Snake) by a German Zoologist named W. Peters and referred to as the Giant Brown Snake. The specimen collected by Amalie Dietrich is still in existence in an East Berlin Museum called Naturkunde der Humboldt University.

The first man to capture and milk live Taipan's was Dr Donald Thomson, an anthropologist who lived with and studied the Aborigines of the Cape York Peninsula. It was Thomson who later discovered that the Taipan caught by Amalie Dietrich (Pseudechis scutellatus) and the two killed by
McLennan (Oxyuranus maclennani) were in fact the same snake. Thomson sent a report to the Zoological Society of London in the year 1933 that outlined the reasons for his belief that both snakes were in fact the same genus and species and that he believed the genus Oxyuranus should be retained.

Thomson later worked on the Taxonomy of the Taipan and investigated all previous works including those by Kinghorn to eventually conclude that the most appropriate name for this snake was 'Oxyuranus scutellatus'."

The above extracts are from: Masci, P., Kendall, P.
'The Taipan - World's Most Dangerous Snake'. 1995