What hath God wrought!
Mr. Nature here, with possibly the oddest creature on the planet–Australia’s famous duck-billed platypus. In fact, the animal is so odd that when the first specimens arrived in England, scientists thought it was a hoax.
The platypus is a mammal, or so they say. But it has some weird un-mammalian features.
It lays eggs.
Its legs are positioned out to the side, as in reptiles, instead of directly underneath the body, as in most mammals.
The babies hatch out of the eggs with teeth, but lose them later on.
The male has poisonous heel spurs that can inflict intense pain on a human being. Very few mammals are equipped with venom: only the solenodon springs to mind. But lots of snakes, and some lizards, are poisonous.
But the platypus does have hair, and plenty of it, the mother nurses the babies on milk, and as far as the science of taxonomy is concerned, platypuses are mammals in good standing–not some weird little group of their own that displays both mammalian and reptilian features. That went out with the Triassic Period.
And we can admire the Creator’s creativity!
