Last modified on Mon 21 Dec 2020 09.46 EST Dr Kenny Travouillon turned off the lights and headed straight for the shelf holding the stuffed platypus, armed with an ultraviolet torch to test something out. Would the monotreme glow? “All the platypuses were glowing,” says Travouillon, the mammals curator at the Western Australian Museum in Perth. “We went through with other mammals and we found they were glowing too.” The museum’s stuffed mammal collection has about 65,000 specimens of roughly 800 different species, including all of Australia’s many marvellous and occasionally oddball animals. Bare-nosed Wombats under ultraviolet light. Photograph: Western Australian Museum Under the UV light, creatures including bilbies, bandicoots, wombats, flying foxes, microbats, Tasmanian devils and echidnas all took on a distinct disco-like glow. Kangaroos, though, were “rather disappointing”.