The Beast Nobody Believed In

Seventeen ninety-nine, London. In the hands of naturalist George Shaw is a skin, shipped from Australia. A duck's bill, a beaver's tail, otter-like feet… Shaw picks up his scissors and starts hunting for stitches. He's certain: this is a fake. A hoax. Someone's sewn together bits of different animals — and is having a laugh at the expense of London science.

He never found a single stitch.

This animal is a living question with no answer. The female lays eggs, soft white-shelled eggs — and then feeds her young on milk. Except there's no nipple. The milk simply seeps through the skin and fur, and the babies lick it straight off their mother's belly… Picture that tenderness — almost invisible, almost impossible to believe.

The bill isn't a bill in the bird sense at all. It's soft, warm to the touch, and packed end to end with nerve endings. Underwater, the platypus shuts its eyes, ears, and nose, and reads the world through electric fields instead. Every worm in the mud, every larva under a stone gives off a faint electrical current — and that bill picks it up like an antenna.

And on the male's hind legs: spurs loaded with venom. The pain is so severe that ordinary painkillers barely touch it. It's one of the very few venomous mammals on the planet.

The platypus line split off from the ancestors we share with it roughly one hundred eighty-seven million years ago. It's older than most of the life forms we think of as ordinary.

Maybe it isn't the platypus that's the strange one here.

Anything at all — a building, a word, a habit you never questioned. moygid dot online.