With the bill of a duck, the body of an otter, and the tail of a beaver, the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) has a long history of confounding the humans who’ve encountered it. Early European settlers took to calling the strange, semi-aquatic mammals they found living in eastern Australian streams “duckmoles.” When Captain John Hunter, the second governor of the New South Wales colony, sent a specimen of the creature to British naturalist George Shaw in 1798, Shaw initially thought it was a hoax.
Thus ensued “a rivalry that pitted nation against nation, naturalist against naturalist, and professional against amateur,” wrote evolutionary biologist Brian K. Hall in a 1999 BioScience article on the history of scientific debate over the species. “Long after the evidence was wrested from Nature half a world away from where the debate raged, biologists continued to argue about this paradoxical creature.”
For much of the two centuries ...
