This huge zoological park, dedicated to Australian fauna, has the best equipped “Platypus house”, in the world. “And, furthermore,”, explains to me Neil Morley, director of the famous Sir Collin MacKenzie Sanctuary of Healesville, Australia, the only site in the world where these animals have reproduced in captivity, “males have, like serpents, on the back paws, a venomous gland connected to a spur.” It’s the famous wire, with which, in 1884, the scholar Caldwell, informed the Zoological British Society, gathered in Montreal, that the Duck billed Platypus, ( Ornithorhynchus anatinus), lays, as birds do, eggs with yolk.Īnd when the first specimen, embalmed, arrived in Europe, many, at the British Museum of London, thought it was a joke: a beaver with a bill similar to the one of a duck, two small eyes and web footed, by sure, did not look true. They are all oviparous, classified in the “monotremes” (literally, “unique hole”), because, as for the birds, the amphibians and the reptiles, the tract of their urogenital apparatus and the alimentary duct converge in only one hind orifice, called cloaca. It’s like if, within hundred millions years, somebody would like to look for the marks of our civilization among the fossils of a car: by sure he could find the bonnet of the Volkswagen, some parts of a mini and some super mini cars, produced for years in large quantity, but couldn’t find any trace of the prototypes, the cars by Cugnot, Stafford or Panhard.Īnd yet, still now left alone in the Australian region, do live some “mammals in transit”, incredibly survived, flesh and blood, to the competition of developed species. Hot blood reptiles, furred birds, mammals which lay eggs: reality had surely to overcome our imagination, even if not too much has remained of all these forms passing by. We know that birds and reptiles are near relatives but these had to be quite different from the present ones, and when, 200 millions of years ago, the first mammals tried new ways, the separations between the groups were not too much definite. There are animals, like the scorpion, suitable for every geological “season”, and practically unchanged since 400 millions of years, but the most part of the living beings, has a suffered history, where well-suited intuitions, and successive reconversions interlace with hard struggles and failures.īlind alleys of the life, extinct species, quickly deleted by an evolution which never proceeds in a direct line, which never closes all the doors, and goes forward reeling, by attempts.Īlmost always, the origins hide under the beginnings, and the “prototypes”, generally don’t leave any trace in the fossils. It has the muzzle of a duck but the fur of a beaver, it lays eggs but suckles its babies, it is gentle but can deploy a poisonous spur, it falls ill from minimal stress but has lived from time immemorial. The Commonwealth of Australia reveres this remarkable mammal so much that it honors the platypus with a place on its 20-cent coin.This is a real oddity. Baby platypuses hatch after 10 days and nurse for up to four months before they swim off and forage on their own. The female platypus lays her eggs in an underground burrow that she digs near the water’s edge. It has no teeth, so the platypus stores its "catch" in its cheek pouches, returns to the surface, mashes up its meal with the help of gravel bits hoovered up enroute, then swallows it all down. The bill also comes equipped with specialized nerve endings, called electroreceptors, which detect tiny electrical currents generated by the muscular contractions of prey. The watertight nostrils on its bill remain sealed so that the animal can stay submerged for up to two minutes as it forages for food. The platypus is a bottom-feeder that uses its beaver-like tail to steer and its webbed feet to propel itself through the water while hunting for insects, shellfish, and worms. While the platypus generally inhabits freshwater rivers, wetlands, and billabongs Down Under, it is also known to venture into brackish estuaries (the combined fresh-and saltwater areas where rivers meet the sea). If its appearance alone somehow fails to impress, the male of the species is also one of the world’s few venomous mammals! Equipped with sharp stingers on the heels of its hind feet, the male platypus can deliver a strong toxic blow to any approaching foe. The platypus is a duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed, egg-laying aquatic creature native to Australia.
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