Friday, February 10, 2006

Nature's Freak Part IV: The Platypus


This species I believe to be the king of nature’s freaks as well as my favorite animal. In English we call him the duckbilled platypus. When the English first discovered the platypus, they sent a stuffed one back to the British Museum in London and officials in the museum thought it was joke. They assumed the explorers had sewed a beak onto a baby beaver. The platypus lives in limbo between mammal and marsupial. It’s toothless, venomous, egg-laying; it has boobs, and it poops, pees, and gives birth through the one hole, the cloaca. It also has the ability to hunt by sensing electrical charges. The platypus paddles through the water with two webbed and clawed hands that are hyperactive and completely out of sync with each other—like a guy in a rowboat who rows with one arm and then the other. It's a tremendous animal and I salute all platypus.

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