Female platypuses lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young, and male platypuses generate a nasty venom during breeding season which they use to incapacitate their competition for the lady platypuses. However, they have some very distinct reptilian characters as well. (Although not because of their color… they are not bright magenta as my childhood-self had feverishly hoped, but rather a dull, dark gray.) Like other mammals, they have fur and produce milk. So platypuses are real, but are they interesting beyond their wacky shape? Undeniably, yes.
Yes, the platypus was so weird-looking that some thought the taxidermist must have been playing a prank, sewing some webbed feet and a large beak onto a furry mammal. So accurate is the similitude, that, at first view, it naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means”.
PLATYPUS EVOLUTION ON WINDOWS SKIN
Some platypus skin eventually made its way to George Shaw at the British museum, and Shaw echoed my flattened-duck observation, albeit far more eloquently: “Of all the Mammalia yet known it seems the most extra-ordinary in its conformation exhibiting the perfect resemblance of the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped. Captain John Hunter, the governor of New South Wales-then a British penal colony-sent a bit of platypus skin back to Britain in 1798 with a drawing.
These strange mammals are found only in the freshwater lakes and streams of Australia, and Westerners did not encounter them until the late eighteenth century. An engraving of a drawing of a platypus made by Captain John HunterĪpparently I wasn’t the only one who originally harbored doubts about whether platypuses are real.