![]() ![]() The extinct ones were the size of houses. There are four living species of echidna (three long-beaked in New Guinea and the short-beaked which is in Australia too) and two extinct ones. There's only one species of platypus so it doesn't really have to be called the "duck-billed platypus." It's only found in Australia. Platypus is semi-aquatic and eats worms, larvae, shrimp, and crayfish echidna lives on land and eats bugs. They diverged from the rest of the mammals about 150 million years ago. Platypus and echidna are the only monotremes today. Placental the sister of her brother Marsupial Maintaining the very high metabolism rate they haveīut you're reminded that it once was thereįrom the embryonic whale to the monkey with no tail Standing in between extinction in the cold For other facts about mammals consult the melancholy song tribute to mammals by They Might Be Giants: They're hairy and warm-blooded like all mammals, and they also have that overlooked fancy three-boned inner ear stucture that characterizes all mammals. That first studied specimen is still in London's Natural History Museum.(See story.) When Europeans first saw a platypus specimen in 1798, some scientists thought it was a taxidermist's hoax sewn together from parts of other animals (an otter, a duck, a beaver). His real name was Aristocles "Plato" was the nickname he got due to his broad figure as a wrestler, though some say it referred to his forehead.) The offical name is Ornithorhynchus anatinus, "bird-nose like a duck." (The same root platy- is seen in Plato's name, and that wasn't his real name either. The first European naturalist to describe it named it platypus but its species name isn't platypus because that name had already been used for a genus of beetle. (Note that although the name means "flat", the main characteristic of a platykurtic distribution is that compared to the normal distribution it has fewer observations extending into the tails of the distribution, i.e., there are fewer outliers, and its flatness is an incidental consequence of that.)īut the platy- in platypus doesn't refer to its conspicuous bill - it refers to its less obvious, but still noticeably flat, feet. The platy- in the name platypus means "flat," and comes from the same root as the word platykurtic, describing the shape of a frequency distribution that departs from the normal ("bell-shaped") curve by being relatively flattened. Some facts about everyone's favorite monotremeĮvery new thing I find out about them is interesting. ![]()
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