Whence
Platypus
Animal

Where does Platypus come from?

The platypus comes from eastern Australia, where it lives in rivers, streams and lakes from Queensland to Tasmania. When the first skin reached Britain in the late 1790s, the furry animal with a duck's bill looked so unlikely that scientists suspected a hoax.

A duck's bill on a furry body

Europeans first met the platypus in 1798, and John Hunter, the second Governor of New South Wales, sent a pelt and a sketch back to Britain. George Shaw, assistant keeper of natural history at the British Museum, published the first description in 1799, in The Naturalist's Miscellany. He wrote that it was impossible not to doubt the animal was genuine, and he used scissors to check for stitches holding on the bill. Finding none, he accepted it as a new kind of animal.

A mammal that lays eggs

The platypus turned out to be stranger still. It is a monotreme, a mammal that lays eggs: the female usually lays two small, leathery eggs and later feeds her young milk from patches on her belly, without teats. Males carry a sharp spur on each ankle, connected to a venom gland; the venom is not lethal to humans, but the pain has been described as excruciating. Underwater the platypus closes its eyes, ears and nostrils and finds prey with sensors in its bill.

Only in eastern Australia

Platypuses live in fresh water from the rainforest lowlands of far northern Queensland to the cold highlands of Tasmania and the Australian Alps. They once lived in South Australia's Adelaide Hills and Mount Lofty Ranges too, but are now gone from that state except for a population introduced to Kangaroo Island in the 1920s. Aboriginal peoples have many names for the animal, such as djanbang in Bundjalung and maluŋgaŋ in Ngunnawal.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · australian.museum ↗ · discovermagazine.com ↗

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