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Did People Really Think the Platypus was Fake?
The eighteenth century was very much an age of exploration (for Europeans).
Samples of exotic creatures were sent back, and one of those was the duck-billed platypus.
Did They Think it was a Hoax?
Yes! Not surprisingly, the scientists who looked at the specimen thought it was a high quality fake.
Clearly, somebody had sewn a duck’s beak onto an otter, or perhaps a mole. George Shaw, a famed English zoologist, wrote in 1799 that “It naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means.”
Thankfully, when he examined it more closely, he realized it was indeed a real creature and made some pretty good and accurate assessments of its habits based on its appearance. He worked out that they lived in water and made burrows.
It took a long time before they established that the males were venomous and that the females laid eggs. Of course, they could just have asked the aborigines who had, of course, observed all of this.
An egg laying mammal was more than the Europeans could handle at the time, apparently.
How would they have reacted if they found out it also had an electrical sense?
All I can say is that they’re kind of cute and I would love to actually see one.
The existence of monotremes also shook up a lot of what we believed about the relationship between mammals and reptiles. They’re still mammals, though; they produce milk.
Likely there were once many more monotremes, but their awkward in between nature made it harder to compete with true mammals (and marsupials. Did early marsupials carry their eggs in a pouch?)