Yeah, but it feels different after reading that their whole tummies are kind of… one large nipple?
5 Likes
3 Likes
You sound quite platyplussed about them
4 Likes
Sort of like politicians then?
2 Likes
They are so wonderfully weird. Like evolutions scrap box come to life.
We need more adorable weirdness in this world.
5 Likes
'Straya… yeah!
3 Likes
Sorry Aussies, kangaroos and emus are pretty cool, but you picked the wrong animal to represent your nation.
6 Likes
yeah, but - what do they taste like?
2 Likes
We could ask Charles Darwin. He was known to sample a number of his exotic specimens, and he crossed his path with at least one platypus.
1 Like
To re-use a wording I’m fond of: the platypus is like a weirder version of the platypus.
5 Likes
composed 100% of wtf
In fact the main ingredient is Platypodium.
6 Likes
They just taste like regular eyebrow studios, but with more silica and turning drywall according to the flooded biome and this handy adverse sriracha reactions chart…sort of a Ondaatjeness rather than gaminess. If harvested under a new moon with a purple ceramic knife you may obtain the 20-sided dice of disposition when cleaning the carcass.
7 Likes
I once saw one in the wild, in a pond in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Australia.
It looked slightly like a small otter, but their eyes are so small and their tail is almost the same size and shape as their bill (beak? mouth?), so the only way I could tell which end was the head was because I assumed it was probably moving head first.
4 Likes
I think there should be a rule in science education: if you’re going to make joking asides, make sure that they are accurate. Frankly, that’s what people will remember from your presentation.
He’s why the official name of a platypus isn’t ‘platypus, but rather “Ornithorhynchus anatinus.” Linnaeus and his disciples divided the entire living world into kingdoms, classes, orders, genera, and species. And for a long time, that was great, because mostly wealthy white guys were doing biology and they loved using nomenclature as a gatekeeping tool. To be a well-respected biologist, you had to memorize thousands of Latin names and understand the complicated family trees of every known animal, and the only people who had time to do that were—you guessed it—other rich dudes.
According to this page,
http://eol.org/pages/323858/overview
The platypus was described scientifically for the first time by Dr George Shaw (1751-1813), who named it Platypus anatinus. Platypus is an anglicised Greek word meaning flat foot, probably referring to the web on its feet. Unfortunately this name had already been applied to a genus of beetles, so it had to be changed. Ornithorhynchus (bird-snout) replaced it, but the species name anatinus (duck-like) remained the same.The original specimen described by Shaw is currently stored with our research collections.
and binomial classification is a whole lot more convenient than polynomial nomenclature.
1 Like
2 Likes
I guess I should not shout to loudly, since I am a white dude, etc., but this?
Oh my.
I don’t know where to start. Maybe with Aristotle?
4 Likes
On the one hand, science at the time was mostly restricted to rich dudes.
On the other hand, that wasn’t because of Linnaeus.
7 Likes
What kind of band would name themselves after such a creature?
Prog-rock, naturally.
3 Likes
Two of my favourite trad bands, The Duhks and The Mammals, occasionally performed together. You can guess the name they used for those shows. 
4 Likes
the bioscience article mentions that Australians (both aboriginal and not) knew that the platypus was a egg layer.
Although Aborigines and some of the early colonists in New South Wales were convinced that platypuses laid eggs, the European scientific community “knew” otherwise. Rarely are the strongly held views of professionals overturned by the evidence of amateurs, and professionals were even less likely to be swayed by colonials or by stories provided by natives. The Sydney Morning Herald (1884) responded to claims of colonists that monotremes laid eggs with the statement that evidence must be “examined and reported on by scientists in whom the world has faith, then all the scientific world will stand convinced and will believe where they have not seen.”
on the other hand…
Several other scientists published descriptions of eggs that were unlikely to be from the platypus. For example, Geoffroy published a description of a “platypus” egg in 1929, only to realize that the egg was much too large to have passed through the female’s pelvic ring. The prominent Australian zoologist Launcelot Harrison, writing of this egg with the advantage of hindsight (Harrison 1921), commented that “it is at once obvious to an Australian zoologist that the egg is that of the common long-necked tortoise (Chelodina longicollis).” It was not unusual for the settlers or even the Aborigines to send eggs of other species to Europe, representing them as platypus eggs. Owen dissected two “platypus” eggs collected by Aborigines: one contained a snake embryo, the other a lizard.
2 Likes
