Most people are already familiar with the platypus. As though not satisfied with being an egg-laying mammal, the platypus heaps oddity upon oddity until it seems like some taxidermist’s joke. And so it appeared to those first seeing it. In fact, when a description of it was sent to British naturalists they just refused to believe the report. Even when a dried skin was sent to them they decided it was an imposture. Why all this incredulity? Let us see.

Besides laying eggs, the platypus has the following miscellany: animal fur, milk ducts, ducklike bill, webbed feet, heavy beaver-like tail, poison claws on feet and a monkey-like cheek pouch for storing food. Can you imagine the impression the platypus made on those early naturalists?

Yet, because of this hodgepodge of gifts, the platypus reflects the Creator’s wise skill, making him admirably suited to his environment, so that he flourished until the advent of man and gun. With claws for burrowing and fur to keep him warm, he is at home on land, though his real environment is the water. But most wonderful of all is his bill.

This is no horny, lifeless member as is the duck’s. It is highly sensitive​—a mass of nerve endings. When he submerges and propels himself by powerful tail and webbed feet, his eyes and ears become hermetically sealed and the bill takes over. Probing the slime, he sucks in mud, sand and worms! Worms and prawns and larvae! Now his bill gets busy selecting meat from mud, storing the one in his cheek pouch and ejecting the other until he surfaces for air and to consume his catch. He keeps busy, rightly, for he eats half his weight a day in worms. This explains why in captivity he costs more to keep than an elephant.

Besides functioning as ears, eyes and nose when swimming, his bill becomes built-in radar when burrowing. Life Nature Library has this to say: “The bill of a platypus is a mass of nerves relaying tactile sensations . . . When burrowing, the platypus is said to have a mysterious awareness of cavities in the earth ahead, which enables it to avoid breaking through into adjacent rabbit warrens, rat holes or other platypus burrows.” Similarly, it senses tree roots and rocks ahead and diverts before reaching them. Would you not agree that the platypus is marvelously fitted to his environment?

The same may be said of the other member of the monotreme family, the echidna. As the only other egg-laying mammal it might be expected to resemble the platypus. But apart from laying eggs, it resembles the other in only two ways: Both suckle their young and both have the single body exit or cloaca.

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The platypus is an egg-laying mammal with an amazing ducklike bill