Naturalist and popular
Naturalist and popular artist John Gould illustrated and described the koala in his three-volume work The Mammals of Australia (1845–1863) and introduced the species, as well as other members of Australia’s little-known faunal community, to the general
British public.[125] Comparative anatomist Richard Owen, in a series of publications on the physiology and anatomy of Australian mammals, presente\\\
d a paper on the anatomy of the koala to the Zoological Society of London.[126] In this widely cited publication, he provided the first careful description of its internal anatomy, and noted its general structural similarity to the wombat.[127] English naturali
st George Robert Waterhouse, curator of the Zoological Society of London, was the first to correctly classify the koala as a marsupial in the 1840s. He identified similarities between it and its fossil relatives Diprotodon and Nototherium, which had been discovered
just a few years before.[128] Similarly, Gerard Krefft, curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney, noted evolutionary mechanisms at work when comparing the koala to its ancestral relatives in his 1871 The Mammals of Australia.[129]
