They just don’t know what to do with this animal. There’s one type of person for whom the platypus is the most perplexing: the evolutionist. Instead, they use their electro-sensitive duck bills to not only find their way around, but also to find their food. Platypuses have eyes, but they’re closed underwater. When small prey move along the riverbed, they create electric currents with their muscles. So, unless you can definitively tell a male apart from a female, resist that temptation to lift a furry platypus out of the water!Īnd what about that duck bill? If you have a close encounter with a platypus, you’ll see that it’s covered in pores. Regardless, getting spurred by a platypus is reportedly an intensely painful experience.
While no humans are known to have died from a platypus encounter, there are dogs that have met their demise in this way. The male platypus has a spur on its back legs that it uses to inject venom. The features of the platypus get even stranger. However, unlike birds, platypuses nurse their young with milk like mammals. From this cloaca, again like birds, platypuses lay eggs about the size of an acorn. This opening is called a cloaca, similar to birds. Monotremes have one opening used for both reproduction and elimination of waste. The only other monotreme is the echidna, another Aussie oddity. However, they were placed in a special category known as monotremes. So platypuses aren’t as rare as you might think – it’s just a matter of being in the right place.Įventually scientists classified platypuses as mammals. He could have fit in the palm of my hand. Last year, in a tiny little headstream creek I met my first baby platypus. On one occasion, a platypus was digging for food in the riverbed almost right at my feet. That’s led me to frequent platypus encounters. Being a fly-fisherman means I spend a lot of time in Tasmanian creeks and rivers. Even many residents of those states have never encountered this duck-billed curiosity. Part of that is attributable to their range being limited to the eastern states and Tasmania. Sadly, many Australians have never seen a platypus in the wild. But eventually credible observations and research proved the reality of this bewildering creature. They’d been fooled before by concocted “mermaid” specimens from Asia and that wasn’t going to happen twice.
Is it a mammal or a reptile? And why does it have a bill like a duck and a tail like a beaver? When the first platypus specimens were brought to England from Australia in 1798, scientists thought they were a hoax.
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