What is it?

Yesterday at the park, while collecting gumnuts, we found one with a white membrane covering the opening. We conjectured that some creature, such as an insect, may have constructed the covering.

Today we took our gumnut to the museum to see if anyone there would know. At Search and Discover, naturalist Martyn Robinson looked at it through a little hand lens and said we were right: it was probably either a spider or a caterpillar. The spider would have an egg sac in there, and the caterpillar would have eaten the contents of the gumnut and stayed in there using it as a cocoon. He said he'd never before seen a gumnut used this way, and to let the museum know what emerged.

Of course, we also looked at other parts of the museum. The "alive" exhibition had a big craft table for making "beasties", and Search and Discover had bones, turtle shell, drawing materials and toy animals.