The animal that dare not speak its name
Pity the poor platypus. For millennia it hatched its babies in peace beside muddy Australian lakes. Then the Europeans arrived and made its life hell because they could not work out where it went in Mother Nature’s filing cabinet.
First they suspected a joke. When a “duckmole” arrived in Britain in 1798, they thought the beak had been sewn on. Such hoaxes were not unknown. Chinese conmen attached fish tails to mummified monkeys’ bodies and sold them to sailors as mermaids.
Then it was named - twice. The first attempt was platypus anatinus, meaning a duck with flat feet. This was cute but wrong as platypuses have fine feet. The second was ornithorhynchus paradoxus which means paradoxical bird snout. Thanks, guys.
Next it had to be classified. For 85 years the scientists squabbled. They all clung to their entrenched views. Duck-billed platypuses suckled their young. Therefore they were mammals and gave birth to live babies. Therefore they did not lay eggs. Except that the Aborigines said they did.
One poor chap, George Bennett, first curator of the Australian Museum, spent 50 years on the problem. He refused to kill platypuses during the breeding season for fear the animals - already hunted for their fur - would be finished off by science. Bennett’s scruples cost him dear.
In 1885 a young Scot called William Caldwell sent a pithy telegram to the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting. “Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic.” Yes, platypus did lay eggs - ones with large yolks, just like birds and Bennett had been beaten to his discovery.
The platypus, too, paid for Caldwell’s moment of glory. Using a team of 150 Aborigines he had hunted them down, and boasted of the slaughter - around just one pond he laid the corpses of 70 females.
One of only two egg-laying mammals, the platypus is now protected from man’s blunderings. If only the zoologists had been as easy-going as American 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.”
Stephanie Northen
