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PLATYPUS AND THE MOOSE MEESE MESS:A CURE FOR HICCUPS AND TEN BILLION RABBITSAfter a few repeated attempts, we put Canberra in ourrearview and headed on towards Bombola, a small town nestled inthe Snowy Mountains where the capital was originally slated tobe, but couldn’t find it. Instead, on our way back to theBoomerang Coast we stumbled upon something much more exciting.Monotremes.Somewhere in the course of history ducks and beavers musthave cohabitated. There, 210 million years ago a beaver lookedacross his tiny reservoir and saw the prettiest feathered foulin the world. It was love at first sight. The two courted.He showed her the forest--the different trees, how to build adam--she taught him how to fly. It was a simple time in theforest, these things were kosher back then. Ducks and beaverscould express their love. Of course, they were married, andsoon they gave birth to the lovechild of the forest. Theplatypus.It’s that, or God has one crazy sense of humor.I don’t know what was going on in the cosmos when theplatypus first made its appearance, but it must have been an odd
time. It’s such an odd creature, in fact, that when a stuffedversion of the creature was sent back to Europe in 1799 Englishscientists claimed the creature was a hoax pieced together froma variety of creatures, a “high frolic practised on thescientific community by some colonial prankster” were theirexact words. One scientist even tried to cut off the platypus’bill. His scissor marks can still be seen on the creature inLondon’s Museum of Natural History, though you can’t reallyblame him. It takes some creative thinking to put the bill of aduck and a few poisonous barbs on the body of a beaver, have itlay eggs and then suckle its young (not to mention the curiouselectro pulses this monotreme shoots out of its bill).Mark Twain had an interesting theory on the platypus.Firstly, he didn’t call them platypuses; he called themOrnithorhyncuses (a complicated name for a complicated creature)and proposed the theory of “e pluribus unum”.
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Out of one, many,that is. It’s a pretty neat idea--pity it doesn’t hold water--but it’s still a neat idea. He theorized that the platypus wasthe epitomy of Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest. Withthe qualities of a duck, beaver, seal, carnivore, omnivore,Volkswagen, and paper weight, the platypus is a jack of alltrades. Why he can handle water, muck, solid ground, any
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Ornithorhynchus is the first part of the platypuses Latin nameOrnithorhynchus anatinus. I prefer to call them Platies.
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terrain at all: the platypus is the pinnacle of evolution.Twain shot off about how the platypus made his rounds across theglobe and, a few million years later, a slew of creaturesevolved from him (the duck, seal, Rodney Dangerfield, stapler,beaver, newt, etc.). Out of one, many. There you go.Scientists are nearly as baffled today as they were backthen about the platypus’ orgins. Granted, we’re no longertrying to cut off their duck bills, and we’re fairly sure theplatypus isn’t the Alpha and Omega of evolution, but we seem tobe coming up with more questions than answers. We’ve given thecreature it’s own sub-division of the mammalian family--itdoesn’t have much of anything to do with a mammal, but we werewilling to ignore the egg-laying and duck-bill for scientificpurposes (not to mention it’s the only mammal that secretespoison)--but it’s only gotten more complicated since. Nowscientists say the platypus is closer to a bird than anything onaccount it has sex chromosomes more similar to a dodo than say,well, you and me. But then a recent find in South Americarevealed the platypus once had teeth, which would make it closerto a mammal than a bird. Hell, before discovering a toothed,South American platypus we thought the platypus never leftAustralia. My point is that we really don’t know diddly aboutthe mammal . . . or was it a bird?
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