But like the spiny echidna, the platypus has a gullet — the passage that food normally uses to go from the mouth to the stomach — that connects directly to its intestines.
No stomach needed to digest food. The platypus and the beaver look like tail twins! But the platypus doesn't use its tail to move through the water. It uses its tail as a place to store body fat in case of a food shortage. And the female platypus also uses her tail to hold her eggs against her body. Even though platypuses lay eggs, they also produce milk for their babies. But they don't do it the same way other animals do.
Australia is known for it's strange and adorable wildlife found nowhere else on the planet: koalas, kangaroos, and that giant bird that looks like a dinosaur.
And then there's the platypus - a bizarre and reclusive animal that looks sort of like a duck and an otter had a baby, but fluffier.
It's so strange in appearance that when British scientists first encountered the "extraordinary" animal, they famously questioned whether it was an elaborate hoax of different animal bits stuck together. But its weird looks are just scratching the surface. Most people have no idea just how bizarre the half-aquatic species really is.
One of only two monotreme animals in the world , this mammal lays eggs instead of giving birth to live young, and then sweats milk out from pores along its stomach to feed the babies.
Here it is. Platypuses sweat milk! I came across this fact by accident, when it was mentioned offhand in a book I was reading. They secrete milk from specialised mammary glands, just like humans and other mammals. And here, a video about platypuses that includes an absolutely chilling graphic of a beautiful mother platypus leaking her milk all over her tummy while a little baby platypus in a backward baseball cap laps it up.
And yet, it is. See, humans have always tried to categorize animals because, well, we like categorizing. But one man took it to a whole new level: Carl Linnaeus. The Swedish botanist and zoologist had a real penchant for naming things, and single-handedly invented the binomial classification system that we have today. 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. It perpetuated the idea that the natural world can be packaged neatly into natural boxes, when really, we humans were shoving organisms into boxes of our own design—often based on flawed understandings of animals.
A lot of how we differentiated between genera and species had to do with physical features—are they furry? How many legs to they have? Do they lay eggs? We basically just checked off boxes. For instance, we used to think bats were closely related to birds because they fly, and flying things seem like they should be related.
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