For your delectation - the Platypus!

My blip yesterday was a spiny ant-eater, one of only two kinds of mammal to lay eggs rather than to give birth to live young. Today, for your delectation, I bring you the other one, the duck-billed platypus Ornithorhynchus anatinus. Platypuses live in the rivers of Eastern Australia and Tasmania, but I bought my, long-dead, specimen from a junk shop in Aberdeen over 40 years ago.

The platypus is a bizarre looking creature and when the first one arrived in Britain in 1798 naturalists were initially convinced that it was forgery and that some-one had stitched the beak of a duck to the body of a mole and added the tail of a beaver for good measure. Robert Knox, the Edinburgh anatomist was one of the first to realise that the platypus, however bizarre, was indeed a genuine species. (Knox, a brilliant comparative anatomist is most famous, of course, as the anatomist who purchased the murdered victims of Burke and Hare.)

To add to the platypus's strange attributes, it is one of very few venomous mammals, the male having poisonous spurs on its ankles. Furthermore, it is the only mammal known to locate food by using electroreceptors in its bill to detect electric fields generated by the muscles of prey animals. isn't Zoology just great!?

Perhaps it would be best to leave the last word to the poet Ogden Nash.

I like the duck-billed platypus
Because it is anomalous.
I like the way it raises its family
Partly birdly, partly mammaly.
I like its independent attitude.
Let no one call it a duck-billed platitude.