His suspicious death more than 80 years ago broke punters' hearts, now a slight tilt of a conservator's wrist appears likely to have restored Phar Lap's legendary heart.
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Conservators rarely move fragile exhibits suspended in preserving fluid, but National Museum of Australia's conservator Natalie Ison went a small step further than others before her had done for years, unaware she was holding missing pieces of the 1930 Melbourne Cup winner's heart.
Senior curator Dr Martha Sear said staff were replacing fluid and cleaning exhibits for a new horse exhibition which opens on Thursday when Ms Ison slightly tipped a jar so she could have a closer look.
"When she did that she saw a label and on that label were the words that listed the anatomical parts that were in the jar and the final word of the label, which is quite disfigured, was the word Lap," Dr Sear said.
"She recognised there was new information about the object we didn't have."
Museum director Dr Mathew Trinca said the discovery was astonishing.
"For more than 80 years we considered, as almost everybody else did, that the piece missing from the heart that we have on display in our Landmarks gallery, was destroyed or lost in the mists of time," he said.
In a decade of working at the museum, Dr Sear has rarely seen the heart that weighs 6.35 kilograms - nearly twice the size of an average race horse's heart - moved. It sits behind glass, with a large section missing, on an anti-vibration platform to avoid fragments coming away.
The museum believes the additional parts, the heart wall, aorta and pericardium, were taken at the University of Sydney to try to learn why Phar Lap died, and what sort of heart drove his success.
More analysis of the specimens will be done after the exhibition closes in march 2015.
For two years museum staff researching for the Spirited: Australia's Horse Story exhibition began looking at the former Australian Institute of Anatomy collection which came to the museum when the institute closed in 1984.
They were interested in horse-related wet specimens to display as evidence of a horse's body and how people have understood it. After making her discovery, Ms Ison emailed a photograph of the label to colleagues.
"The moment where we opened that photograph and stood looking at it and looked at the label and put together potentially what that final word might mean, that it may be the second half of Phar Lap's name, is a moment that will live in our memories forever," Dr Sear said.
Phar Lap's 36 wins from 41 races came during the Great Depression, a bleak time when punters had little to cheer about. It mattered little Phar Lap was New Zealand-born, the fact an outsider could run down more fancied rivals struck a chord with people.
