In the 1790s, George Shaw faced something of a mystery. As a keeper of the natural history department of the British Museum (which later became the Natural History Museum), Shaw had already spent some time examining samples of exotic wildlife coming from the newly colonized and largely unexplored continent of Australia.
But around 1799, Shaw was presented with a pelt and a drawing of an Australian creature that seemed to be too exotic. Its physical features were so astonishing, he and others initially couldn’t believe what they were seeing. You could hardly blame Shaw for being dubious.
Scientific fraud, then as now, definitely existed, with some hoaxes so outlandish and audacious that it’s hard to imagine they ever fooled anyone (although many of them did, and for years). Now, here was somebody from a land on the other side of the world submitting a new take on the legendary chimera, an animal composed of distinct parts of other animals.
The creature — if indeed it was a real creature — possessed a duck’s bill, fur like a mole, an otter-like body and a beaver’s tail. Eventually, it would be determined that it also laid eggs in the manner of a bird or a reptile. But when its young hatched from those eggs, the creature produced milk to feed it — a mammalian trait.
Yeah, you’d be skeptical, too.
