When the first Europeans came into contact with the platypus, at the end of the 18th century, the reaction was one of disbelief. Here’s what happened, why and what makes the “duck-like bird’s snout” such a strange animal.
In 1798, a copy in the form of a skin and a drawing arrived from Australia to England and generated immediate suspicion: it looked like too strange to be true. The unlikely combination of characteristics led some scientists to consider that it could be an ingenious fraud, a prank, let’s say.
The English zoologist George Shawone of the first to analyze the material, admitted that it was “impossible” not to question the authenticity of the animal, recalls . The most repeated hypothesis was that of a hoax: had someone sewn a duck’s beak to a beaver’s body?
To resolve any and all doubts, Shaw carefully inspected the specimen for seams. He found no sign of manipulation and ended up becoming the first to formally describe the species, initially naming it as Platypus anatinus (“duck-like flatfoot”).
Later, the designation was refined to Ornithorhynchus anatinus (“duck-like bird snout”).
The strangeness of the platypus was not limited to its appearance. The animal looked like a mosaic: duck beak, body resembling an otter and tail similar to a beaver. Even more perplexing to the taxonomy of the time was its reproductive biology. Despite being a mammal… it lays eggs, like birds, but… it feeds its young with milk.
Years of study and lively debates led, finally, to its classification as monotremes, a group considered “primitive” within mammals. The term comes from the Greek and means “one opening”, referring to the cloaca, a multi-purpose orifice through which excretions, reproductive secretions and fertilized eggs pass. Today, the platypus is one of only five living species of monotremes, alongside four species of echidnas, all of which are oviparous.
In the case of the platypus, the female lays two small eggs, with a leathery texture, in a nest lined with grass in a breeding tunnel. About 10 days later, the cubs, tiny, blind and hairless. For the next four months, the mother feeds them thick, nutrient-rich milk, released from specialized pores on the abdomen — the animal has no nipples — and licked from the fur.
And the singularities don’t stop there: the beak is full of receptors capable of detecting touch, pressure and electrical signals emitted by the movements of prey, such as crustaceans and insect larvae. You males are poisonousand use hollow spurs on their hind legs to inject venom in confrontations with rivals. Even swimming defies the “normal”: instead of using all four legs, it is propelled mainly with the front ones, while the tail and hind feet help guide the direction.
Instead of the usual pair of sex chromosomes of most mammals, the platypus has ten, in addition to a set of genes with mammalian, reptile and other traits considered unique. For 18th century scientists, it was too much to be real.
