In 1799, George Shaw, a curator in the natural history department of the British Museum, received a strange skin in the mail. It looked, he wrote, like nothing so much as “the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped.”
So unusual was this creature that Shaw suspected “some deceptive preparation by artificial means.” Legend has it that you can still see scissor marks on the specimen’s beak, where he checked for stitches.
It wasn’t a prank – it was a platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus). But it’s easy to understand Shaw’s befuddlement. Even to 21st-century beholders, the platypus’s grab bag of attributes can seem a little fudged.
What is a platypus?
These animals lay eggs but nurse their young, are fur-covered but live underwater, and have fleshy bills, webbed feet, sharp claws and venom-filled ankle spikes.
We are beginning to see how these traits serve platypuses well in the streams and rivers where they live. They paddle with their webbed front feet, steer with their back ones, and dig ovular burrows with their claws.
Females lay round, leathery eggs and lactate without nipples; when the young hatch, they lap milk directly off their mother’s body.
Males likely use their poison spurs to spar for dominance during mating season.
What do platypus eat?
Platypuses hunt crustaceans and other prey with the help of electrosensory receptors in their beaks, which allow them to tune in to movement in the mucky water. When they walk on land, they retract the webbing on their feet to expose claws and get a better grip.
Do platypus really glow in the dark?
A few years back, researchers discovered that they glow a soft blue green under blacklight – which may be a by-product of a camouflage strategy involving UV absorption, although it’s hard to say for sure. In other words, even as we come up with new ways to study platypuses, they continue to blur our categories and confuse our boundaries.
Recent genetic analyses suggest that, along with their cousins the echidnas, platypuses are closest of all to the original mammal ancestor whose descendants branched out into the creatures we now find more familiar, from dogs to whales to humans. Strange though they may seem, platypuses may not be an anomaly but the blueprint.
How to see platypuses
Latrobe, Tasmania, is known as the platypus capital of Australia – try the Warrawee Forest Reserve there. Be there at dusk or dawn on a cloudy day, and stay quiet – they’re very shy.
This article is excerpted from Atlas Obscura: Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders by Joshua Foer & Cara Giaimo. Workman Publishing, 2024.
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