January 3, 2022 • 38 mins
When European naturalists saw a platypus for the first time, they found it so bizarre that they thought it was fake, and then argued about how to classify it for almost a century. This happened in tandem with similar discussions about another Australian animal – the echidna, or spiny anteater – and discussions of scientific taxonomy in general.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy the Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. A while back,
I was wishing I had an episode to work on
that was something along the lines of the pilt Down Man.
(00:24):
The pilt Down Man was a case of scientific fraud.
It was a skull that was purportedly fossil evidence of
an evolutionary missing link, but really it was a total fabrication.
Threw a ranch into the study of human evolution. But
researching that one involved reading a lot of old science
writing in which people were very authoritatively saying stuff that
(00:45):
was totally wrong, and I just I enjoyed that research process.
I even talk in the episode of how I enjoyed
that process thanks to a totally random Jeopardy rerun that
I saw while I was visiting my parents. I had
an an idea for an episode that's almost the opposite
of The pilt Down Man, because it's about how when
(01:05):
European naturalists saw a platypus for the first time, it
was so bizarre to them that they thought it was fake.
Then they argued about how to classify the platypus in
the taxonomy of animals for almost a century. This was
happening in tandem with similar discussions about another Australian mammal,
(01:26):
which is the kidna or spiny ant eater, and it
was part of just discussions of the scientific taxonomy in general.
That's what we're going to talk about today. And just
as a heads up, European research into the anatomy and
morphology of these animals included shooting a lot of them.
Just be aware. So, the platypus is a mammal native
(01:48):
to Eastern Australia, Tasmania and the surrounding islands. They're fairly
unique in the animal world. And if you've never seen one,
but you have seen lots of more typical mammals, I
think it's seem incredibly weird. Yeah, if you're if you're
animal experience with mammals is like bears and cats and dogs,
(02:08):
you look at a platypus and you're like, what is this? Yeah,
I'll tell a story in our behind the scenes about
the first time I saw a platypus or an image
of a platypus. I should say, Okay, they have for
like a mammal, but a bill that looks like it
belongs on a bird, thus the name duck build platypus,
although that bill is really a sensory organ that's a
(02:29):
lot more flexible than a duck's bill. Males have spurs
on their hind legs that are equipped with venom glands,
something that's way more common among reptiles. Platypuses produce milk
to feed their young like other mammals do, but they
also lay eggs, which is something the overwhelming majority of
other mammals do not do. It's a quite a while
(02:53):
for European naturalists to figure out the whole milk production
and egg laying situation, which is going to be a
big part of this episode. But even without those details,
the platypus just seemed bizarre. In British Royal Navy officer
John Hunter, who would later become Governor of New South
(03:13):
Wales Colony, wrote that the platypus had come to be
thanks to quote a promiscuous intercourse between the different sexes
of all these different animals. In other words, lots of
different animals had mated with one another, and the platypus
was the result That sounds kind of cookie today. But
(03:33):
this was not just a random colonial officials rambling on
the subject. Hunter was a naturalist himself. He was a
member of the Royal Society. I mean I could see
where there's no other explanations. I probable my child logic
for where such animals came from, right, that would lead
you to that sort of conclusion. But of course Australia's
(03:54):
first people's have known about these animals for thousands of years.
The platypus has a role in the Aboriginal religious and
cultural knowledge that early anthropologists described as the dreaming or
the dream time. These stories and traditions from all across
the continent are deeply sacred to Aboriginal and tourist straight
islander people's, so they aren't really ours to share in
(04:16):
the podcast. But what we do want to stress here
is that a lot of what Europeans were arguing about
and trying to prove in the nineteenth century was already
commonly known among many Aboriginal communities. Scientists simultaneously relied on
Aboriginal people to help them find platypuses to study, and
also disregarded their knowledge about their physiology. One of the
(04:40):
reasons why the platypus was so baffling to Europeans and
the nineteenth century was that naturalists and anatomists and other
such specialists had been methodically cataloging and categorizing life on Earth,
starting primarily with Swedish naturalist Carlinaeus in his System and
a Tire or System of Nature. In seventeen thirty five,
(05:02):
Linnaeus created a taxonomy that arranged life into a hierarchy.
And this was a hierarchy that was based on observable
characteristics and traits. And this was not the world's first
attempt to classify and categorize life on Earth by any means.
There's evidence of classification systems in ancient Chinese and Egyptian texts,
(05:23):
and Aristotle and his contemporaries created basic taxonomies around the
third and four centuries b C. But Linnaeus established a
system that's at the heart of what's still used today.
It initially described three kingdoms, animal, vegetable and mineral, with
life in the plant and animal kingdoms arranged by class order, genus, species,
(05:45):
and variety. And as I said earlier, there was a
hierarchy to all of this. Animals were of the highest rank,
and then plants, and then minerals. This idea of a
hierarchy then carried through each of the kingdoms, so, for example,
well mammals were up at the top of the animals,
humans were up at the top of the mammals. These
(06:06):
hierarchical ideas also went on to form the basis of
scientific racism when they were used to categorize groups of
people from different parts of the world. In the tenth
edition of Systeminature, Linnaeus divided the animal world into mammalia
or mammals a vis or birds, amphibia or amphibians, which
(06:26):
also included reptiles, pisces or fish, insecta or insects, and vermes,
which translates to worms but was kind of a catch
all for invertebrate animals that also didn't have an exo skeleton.
Warm blooded animals whose hearts had to atrea and two
ventricles were mammals if they gave birth to live young,
(06:48):
and birds if they lay eggs. Cold blooded animals whose
hearts had one atrium and one ventricle were amphibians if
they breathe through lungs, and fish if they breathe through gills.
As he described each class in more detail. Linnaeus also
noted that mammals fed their young through lactiferous teets. The
(07:10):
Latin word mamma or breast, is the root of the
word mammal, So this all suggest that in Lenaeus's mind,
the key features of mammals what was worth naming them
after was milk production and females. Generally speaking, today's scientific
taxonomy has more categories at every level and more precise
(07:30):
methods for determining what goes where than Linnaeus's original work did.
But this progression has been about more than just adding
more specific and accurate factual details. Linnaeus and his contemporaries
were also working from the idea that life was just
as it had always been. The idea of evolution over
time did not really enter into it for more than
(07:52):
a century. Instead, Linnaeus framed his work as the categorization
of God's creations as God had made them, with that
work reflecting God's intentions. God had created all these plants
and animals. They had been in their present state from
the time of their creation, so by carefully examining them
(08:12):
in Linnaeus's mind, you could find an observable, sortable pattern
that demonstrated the will of God. So with that worldview
in mind, when Europeans started encountering some of Australia's more
unique wildlife, they really just did not know what to
make of it. They defied categorization. You can see this
(08:33):
confusion in one of the earliest written descriptions of the
platypus in English, in an Account of the English Colony
in New South Wales from its first settlement in seventy
eight to August eighteen o one, with remarks on the dispositions, customs, manners,
etcetera of the native inhabitants of that country, to which
are added some particulars of New Zealand. That was written
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by David Collins. Collins had been born in London, had
arrived in Australia with the first fleet in seventeen eighties six,
and he served as Deputy Judge Advocate and eventually became
Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales. He published this book
in eighteen o two, and in volume two he listed
a number of the different animals that had been observed
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in the colonies earliest years, before going on to say
that more recently, quote an amphibious animal of the mole
species had been spotted on the shore of a lake.
Collins went on to describe this animal, and that was
accompanied by a drawing of it by Captain John Hunter,
who by this point had become Governor of New South Wales.
(09:38):
Collins described the animal's small eyes and clawed, webbed feet
before saying quote, the tail of this animal was thick, short,
and very fat. But the most extraordinary circumstance observed in
its structure was its having, instead of the mouth of
an animal, the upper and lower mandibles of a duck.
By these it was enabled to supply it self with
(10:00):
food like that bird in muddy places or on the
banks of the lakes, in which its webbed feet enabled
it to swim. While on shore it's long and sharp
claws were employed in burrowing nature, thus providing for it
in its double or amphibious character. These little animals had
been frequently noticed rising to the surface of the water
(10:21):
and blowing like the turtle. So this was a mole
and a duck and a turtle. It's just not what
people were expecting when they showed up in Australia. When
naturalists in Europe received specimens of the platypus from Hunter,
They were similarly perplexed by what they were looking at,
and we will have more on that. After a quick
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sponsor break in, Captain John Hunter sent a sketch of
the water mole to the Literary and Philosophical Society d
in Newcastle upon time, along with a preserved skin from
(11:04):
one of the animals. This made its way to George Shaw,
keeper of the Natural History collections at the British Museum
which is now the Natural History Museum, but at first
Show was really not convinced that the skin that he
had received was authentic. He very carefully started looking for
signs of stitching, thinking that maybe had somebody had sowed
(11:25):
a duck's bill onto a mole's body. Of course, he
found no such evidence, because it was a platypus in
se Shaw teamed up with illustrator Frederick P. Noder to
produce the Naturalist's Miscellany, or colored figures of natural objects
drawn and described immediately from nature. In this Shaw wrote, quote,
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of all the mammalia yet known, it seems the most
extraordinary in its confirmation, exhibiting the perfect resemblance of the
beak of a duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped.
So accurate is the similitude that, at first view it
naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means.
(12:09):
The very epidermist proportions seratures, manner of opening, and other particulars,
is the beak of a shoveler or other broad builled
species of duck presenting themselves to the view. Nor is it,
without the most minute and rigid examination, that we can
persuade ourselves of its being the real beak or snout
of a quadruped. This work goes on to say, quote,
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the body is depressed and has some resemblance to that
of an otter in miniature. It is covered with a
very thick, soft and beaver like fur, and is of
a moderately dark brown above subfruginous white beneath. The head
is flattish and rather small than large. The mouth or snout,
as before observed, so exactly resembles that of some broad
(12:55):
build species of duck, that it might be mistaken for such.
Shaw's doubts about what he's looking at are clear. He
wrote quote on a subject so extraordinarily as the present,
A degree of skepticism is not only pardonable but laudable.
And I ought, perhaps to acknowledge that I almost doubt
the testimony of my own eyes with respect to the
(13:18):
structure of this animal's beak. Yet must confess that I
can perceive no appearance of any deceptive preparation. And the
edges of the rictus, the insertion, etcetera, when tried by
the test of maceration in water, so as to render
every part completely movable, seemed perfectly natural. Nor can the
(13:39):
most accurate examination of expert anatomists discover any deception in
this particular. Shaw's work here predated David Collins's account of
the English colony that we read from earlier, so this
was the first thorough description of a platypus and English writing.
Shaw also made the first attempt at giving this animal
(13:59):
a name, which was Platypus anatoust which roughly translated to
flat footed duck. In eighteen hundred, Thomas Buick published a
wood engraving of a platypus in the adenda to the
fourth edition of A General History of Quadrupeds. He didn't
name the animal, though the engraving was just titled an
(14:20):
amphibious Animal. In the adenda, he described both the amphibious
animal and the wombat, which he calls a wombatch. With
ach ending. He says the aquatic animal quote seems to
be an animal, Suey Gennaris. It appears to possess a
threefold nature, that of a fish, a bird, and a quadruped,
and it is related to nothing that we have hitherto seen.
(14:42):
We shall not attempt to arrange it in any of
the useful modes of classification, but content ourselves with giving
the description of both these curious animals as they have
been transmitted to us. Suey Gennaris means unique. In eighteen hundred,
also German physician and naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach received a
(15:03):
platypus skin from Hunter as well. He did his own
study of it, and since he knew the name platypus
had already been used on a type of beetle in,
he chose a different name, Ornithoryncus paradoxus, or paradoxical bird snout.
Eventually this became Ornithoryncus anatinus, combining the genus that Blumenbach
(15:25):
had coined with the species from Shaw's name. Even though
platypus was only briefly part of the proposed scientific name
for this animal. It really stuck around as the common
name it outlasted. Lots of other names were things like
water mole. It just don't have the same beautiful ring.
These were by far not the only Europeans trying to
study the platypus, something that was inherently challenging. Most of
(15:49):
them could not personally make the trip to Australia, and
they were practically on the other side of the planet
from where platypuses were, so they had to rely on
specimens scent by but living in Australia or procured by
expeditions to the continent. In addition to the time and
effort involved with that, specimens were often damaged in transit.
(16:10):
The first skin that George Shaw received was pretty badly
desiccated by the time he got it. Plus, the ships
that carried these specimens to Europe typically traveled through waters
that were also home to ships from Eastern Asia, where
people were known to use taxidermy to create really convincing
representations of hybrid animals. These included things like P. T.
(16:32):
Barnum's Fiji Mermaid, which was the head and torso of
a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish and
was reportedly purchased from Japanese sailors. The platypus itself already
seemed like an improbable animal, so the existence of these
Taxi Army specimens at it just a whole layer of
complication and skepticism. Whenever people received do specimens, and when
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researchers did get their hands on equality specimen to study,
sometimes their findings just made things even more confusing. Outwardly,
the platypus looked mostly like a mammal except for that
bird like bill. But in eighteen o two, British surgeon
and Royal Society fellow Sir Everard Home dissected a platypus
(17:16):
and found that the male had internal testes, that is
a trait that's common to reptiles, not mammals. He also
found that both males and females had a cloaca, that is,
one orifice to the outside of the body for both
digestive waste and for reproductive products. That was again something
that had been found in birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish,
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but not in mammals. Not long after Home published work
on these discoveries, Etienne Jeffroy Saint Hilaire of France coined
the term monetary to describe both the platypus and the Echidnea,
deriving the name from Home's discovery of these animals having
a cloaca. He suggested the monotreams belonged in their own class,
(18:02):
which he named monotrema. The presence of a cloaca raised
lots of questions about platypus reproduction. Sir Joseph Banks tasked
botanical collector George Kayley with going to Australia to look
into these questions for both the platypus and the Achidna.
Kayley developed relationships with Aboriginal people to try to learn
what they already knew. In a eight O three he
(18:25):
wrote to Banks to say that one man had told
him that the platypus laid eggs deep underground, but he
had no physical evidence to prove it. And another pressing
question was whether platypus is produced milk to feed their young.
According to scientific understanding at the time, only mammals did that.
But if platypus has laid eggs, as Kaylee's source had reported, then,
(18:48):
according to the then current understanding, no mammals did that.
As a side note, there are some birds that produce
a milk like substance in a part of their esophagus
known as the crop. It's no as crop milk or
pigeon milk, and it plays a similar role to mammals
milk and nourishing young in the earliest days of their life.
But that is not what we're talking about here. Now.
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That is a different thing. Because of these questions about
eggs and milk, though, various experts took the same approach
as Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire had done, proposing that the
platypus belonged in the entirely new category. Jehan Baptiste la
Barc of France proposed the new class called proto Heria
in eighteen o nine for both platypuses and a kidneys,
(19:33):
and French zoologist Johann Carl Wilhelm Illiger proposed one called
Reptantia in eighteen eleven. In eighteen seventeen, French scientist George
Cuvier placed the platypus and the echidna in a new
genus within the order eden Tata, which was already home
to ant eaters and splats, but Cuvier also noted there
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still needed to be an examination of these purported eggs.
We have mostly been talking about people working from Europe,
but researchers were at work in Australia as well. Botanical
collector Sir John Jamison was born in Ireland and moved
to Australia after inheriting property there in eighteen eleven. In
eighteen sixteen, he wrote of the platypus quote the female
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is oviparous and lives in burrows in the ground, so
that it is seldom seen either on shore or in
the water. This was based on his own observations and
he was both respected and trained in medicine. But the
scientific community still wanted proof, and that was challenging because
those burrows which did exist were hard to find and
(20:38):
hard to get into. In the eighteen twenties, German anatomus
Johann Meckel published four influential studies on the platypus. He
described the venom gland in males and the mammary glands
and females, although he didn't see any signs of those
mammary glands being connected to nipples. Then, in eighteen thirty two,
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Lauderdale Maud of Scotland published two papers describing both the
mammary glands and the milk production in a live platypus
British comparative. Anatomist Richard Owen, who would go on to
coin the term dinosaur, confirmed the presence of mammary glands
in his own paper in eighteen thirty two, including noting
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that they seemed to be enlarged in specimens that also
showed evidence of having recent activity in their ovaries. That
in eighteen thirty three, biologist George Bennett discovered that platypus
milk left the body through pores, sort of like sweat does,
and then it collected on the abdomen for the young
(21:39):
to drink. For some naturalists, this added up to conclusive
evidence that the platypus lactated, and only mammals lactate, so
platypuses were definitely mammals, and at least for some, that
was also enough to answer the question of platypuses laid eggs,
because mammals do not lay eggs, so if platypuses were mammals,
(22:00):
they did not lay eggs. But others, including Etienne Jeffrey,
concluded that Michael and mad had to be mistaken. Maybe
those glands were producing some kind of skin lubricant rather
than milk. This is kind of the same logic, only
in reverse. Jeffrey had concluded that platypuses lay eggs, and
that meant that they simply could not produce milk. It
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was impossible your if then statements are all messy. This
led to a lot of division and dispute among naturalists,
as various men who had published work on platypuses tried
to defend their reputations in the face of other seemingly
contradictory work, and of course most of this was ignoring
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the observations of Aboriginal people and at this point some
European colonists who reported the platypuses definitely laid eggs. To
be clear, this testimony was not always consistent. There were
language and cultural barriers at work, among other things. But overall,
besides just wanting physical evidences proof, the scientific community was
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generally dismissive of anything Aboriginal people reported. Charles Darwin stopped
in Sydney in eighteen thirty six at the end of
his voyage aboard the Beagle. While in Australia, he saw
platypuses for himself, including one that had been shot by
a member of his expedition, and in the years that followed,
Platypuss came up in his letters to his colleagues as
(23:28):
he was sort of thinking through his ideas on natural selection.
Darwin later used the platypus as an example in on
the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty nine, in a
discussion of how animals traits influenced how people classified them,
even if those traits were not necessarily the most important ones.
(23:50):
Quote if the orna thorncas had been covered with feathers
instead of hair, this external and trifling character would I
think have been considered by naturalists as important an aid
in determining the degree of affinity of this strange creature
to birds and reptiles, as an approach instructure in anyone
internal and important organ The work of Darwin and his
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successors would eventually put the platypus in context based on
how it evolved over time and how that was related
to the evolution of other animals. But in eighteen thirty six,
when he was in Sydney, there were still far more
questions than answers and we'll talk more about that after
we pause for a sponsor break. As we said earlier,
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some nineteenth century researchers saw lactation and egg laying as
mutually exclusive animals simply could not do both of those things.
But for others establishing that the platypus did lactate, that
didn't rule out egg laying. Instead, it made this an
e been more important question to definitively answer. But eyewitness
(25:04):
testimony of platypuses with eggs was not enough, because it's like,
what if those were some other animals eggs and the
platypus just happened to be near them. I mean, that's
a sure that could happen. Sometimes people found egg fragments
in platypus burrows, but that also wasn't conclusive, because theoretically
(25:24):
a platypus might eat eggs, those could be the remnants
of its food. So researchers wanted to find a pregnant
platypus or one in the process of laying an egg,
or an egg that contained what was clearly a developing
platypus embryo. Researchers had already killed a lot of platypuses
for research in the first decades of the nineteenth century,
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but attempts to meet these specific criteria led them to
kill a lot more Yeah, and it was more specifically
destructive because they were specifically looking for females. We mentioned
earlier that cleverly made East Asian taxid army specimens had
led to some skepticism about whether platypus specimens were genuine,
(26:09):
and when it came to this question of whether platypuses
lay eggs, incorrect eggs specimens had the same effect. Both
Aboriginal people and colonists submitted samples that were purportedly platypus eggs,
but they turned out to belong to completely different animals,
including tortoises, lizards, and snakes. It's really not clear whether
(26:31):
any of this was intentional or just a case of
mistaken identity. Also, the question wasn't just do platypuses lay
eggs or do they give birth to live young. Some
animals are ovo viviparous, meaning they produce eggs, but the
eggs develop inside the mother's body, either hatching inside the
body or immediately after the egg is laid. So did
(26:54):
the platypus give birth to live young that had been
nourished through a placenta like a mammal, or did the
platypus produce eggs? And if eggs were involved, did they
develop and hatch inside or outside the body? Past podcast
subject Jules Verreaux is going to be an upcoming Saturday
Classic spent fifteen months in Tasmania, much of that time
(27:17):
studying platypuses. Based on this research, he concluded that the
platypus was over viviparous in He also wrote, quote the
order the rincus as an animal bizarre of structure and
offers numerous analogies with a host of different species and
even classes. And its external form it resembles in some
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degree the mole as to its body, the beaver as
to its tail, and the duck as to its beak.
Its internal structure, more astonishing, still resembles that of certain
reptiles and appears to form a link between mammals and lizards.
Richard Owen directed George Bennett of the Australian Museum to
hunt for female platypuses either pregnant or with eggs. Bennett
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had previously dissected female platypuses and found eggs in their uteruses,
but none of those eggs contained any embryos, so they
didn't offer any insight into whether the young might hatch
from eggs or be born alive. But Bennett was concerned
about this idea, fearing for the future of the species
if researchers indiscriminately killed females to try to answer this
(28:23):
egg question. Bennett was also concerned about the killing of
Australian animals more generally. In eighteen sixty he wrote Gatherings
of a Naturalist in Australasia being observations principally on the
animal and vegetable productions of New South Wales, New Zealand
and some of the austral Islands, And in the preface
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to this he said, quote, unless the hand of man
be stayed from their destruction, the ornitho ryncus and the echidna,
the emu and the megapodius, like the dodo moa, and
no tortoise will shortly exist only in the pages of
the natural list. The effort to find platypus eggs or
pregnant platypus is continued for decades without clear success. Then
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in eighteen sixty four, two miners brought a female platypus
to gold receiver George Rumby. Rumby reported that she laid
two eggs while closed up in a gin create, but
he wasn't sure that this was normal for the platypus.
He thought that the fear involved with being shut up
in that gin create may have caused her to essentially
(29:29):
miscarry her eggs. In eighteen eighty two, British biologist and
embryologist Francis Maitland Balfour, known as Frank, suggested that William
Hay Calledwell traveled to Australia to study the egg question.
Caldwell had graduated from Cambridge in eighteen eighty and had
been teaching comparative anatomy. Not long after Balfour made this suggestion,
(29:52):
he died while mountain climbing in the Swiss Alps. A
Traveling Studentship was named in his honor, and Caldwell became
its first recipient. Caldwell used the money and prestige that
came with the studentship, along with the backing of the
Royal Society, to travel to Australia and to study several
of its animals, including platypus, is kidneas and lungfish. On
(30:15):
August nine four, after a four months search assisted by
Aboriginal people, Calledwell shot a female platypus. There was an
egg nearby, one that was presumably hers. He also found
an egg in the mouth of her uterus, which he
described as being at a stage equal to a thirty
(30:36):
six hour chick. Caldwell reported his findings through a telegram
that read quote monotreums oviparous ovum merro blastic. Merro Blastic
is a term used to describe an egg's cleavage after
it's been fertilized, So in lay terms, this essentially said
monotreams lay eggs, and their eggs contain lots of yolk.
(30:57):
Caldwell's message was passed along to a professor he knew
at Sydney University, and from there to the British Association
for the Advancement of Science meeting that was convening in Montreal,
and then just a day after Calledwell's find, William Hawk,
who was curator of the South Australian Museum, also found
an eggshell in an achidnas pouch that led to confirmation
(31:21):
that a kidnas also lay eggs. Pack presented his observation
to the Royal Society of South Australia and Adelaide on
the same day that Calledwell's discovery was announced at the
British Association of the Advancement of Science meeting. Both those
things happened on September two four. This finally conclusively answered
(31:43):
the question of whether platypuses lay eggs. Yes, they do,
and so do a kidnas. Today there are only five
species of mammal known to lay eggs, which are platypuses,
and then four different species of a kidnam. All of
them are native to the Australian continent and it surrounding islands,
and from an evolutionary standpoint, it's likely that they split
(32:04):
off from other mammals more than two hundred million years ago.
It was only after that point that other mammals evolved
to give birth to live young. After his discovery of
platypus eggs, Caldwell went on to do some incredibly destructive
research into a kidness. He employed a huge team of
Aboriginal people who captured and killed and estimated twelve hundred
(32:27):
to four hundred kidnap between July and August of five.
Caldwell's writing suggests that at least some of these were
being used for food, but he was definitely encouraging this
by paying them half a crown for each female specimen
that they brought to him. He also wrote about this
aboriginal crew in a really disparaging way, and he exploited
(32:49):
them by raising the prices on the flour, sugar and
tea that he sold to them based on how much
he had paid them for a kidneys specimens. So if
you brought him more specimens, he would will sell you
the same amount of tea or sugar or whatever, but
at a higher price based on how much he had
paid for those animals. What a gym uh. This research
(33:09):
into the nature of the platypus had taken ninety five
years and an enormous amount of effort. In the words
of George Bennett, quote of all the Australian mammalia, none
has excited so much attention as the platypus or water mole,
both from its peculiar form and the great desire events
to ascertain the habits and economy of so singular a creature.
(33:32):
He went on to say, quote, perhaps no animal in
its first introduction into Europe, ever, gave rise to greater
doubts as to its classification or excited deeper interests among naturalists,
and interest fully maintained to the present day respecting its
habits and economy than this enigmatical creature, which, from its
(33:52):
external appearance as well as internal anatomy, may correctly be
described as forming a connecting link between quadruped the bird
and the reptile. Bennett wrote that in eighteen sixty, but
that part about quote an interest fully maintained to the
present day is still true. There's still a ton of
ongoing research into the platypus, including the discovery that the
(34:16):
platypus has biofluorescent fur that was announced in so As.
We noted a lot of platypuses were killed during this
research and also through hunting, habitat loss, and other factors
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eventually, though every
Australian state passed conservation laws to protect the platypus. The
(34:37):
last of those laws went into effect in nineteen twelve.
So today platypuses are listed as near threatened on the
International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species.
Not the most upbeat place to land an episode, no,
but I mean it's better than they're being think. I
(35:00):
don't know if that uh. My point being, do you
have a beat listener mail to accompany this? I do
have listener mail. I have listener mail that is about Australia.
UM something. I didn't make the connection until just now
because I had two different listener mails to go with
two different episodes, and I did not pay attention to
which I put with which. So thanks for nota for
(35:22):
this email that turned out to be super related to
this episode. UH this says this was written back in
August after an earlier Unearthed episode, and I flagged it
to read on the show, and then I didn't read it,
so nada said Dear Holly and Tracy, I hope this
email finds you both well during these strange and unusual times.
(35:44):
I've just caught up on the July Unearthed episodes, as
I usually listen to podcasts while i'm driving, but I'm
in lockdown in Melbourne, Australia and haven't really been going
many places. I came across this interesting talk about archaeological
digs taking place in Melbourne, and I thought it might
be interesting for the Edibles Impotable section of the next Unearthed. Uh.
(36:06):
I forgot to come back to it in time for
the next on Earth, so I'm reading it now. There's
a big infrastructure project currently on the go, and as
part of the excavations for a new train station, the
Victorian government conducted archaeological digs on the site prior to
commencing construction work. This particular site was right at the
(36:26):
heart of early Melbourne, including a cottage owned by the
man who founded the city, John Batman. Side note Melbourne
was almost called bat Mania after him. One of the
places they were excavating had been a general store in
the eighteen fifties, but suffered a catastrophic fire in eighteen
fifty five. The shop was destroyed and much of the
remains fell into the underground cellar, which was also full
(36:48):
of stock. The fire was so destructive that they pretty
much just covered over the seller and built over the top.
The excavations revealed to look at an eighteen fifties grocery store,
with everything in the cellar base sickly untouched since the
night of the fire. This allowed insight into how grocery
stores arranged their stock and also what kinds of items
they were stalking Melbourne in the eighteen fifties was a
(37:09):
frontier town, having only been established twenty years prior. Yet
the shop with stocking a range of foods, including relatively
exotic fruits, as well as luxury goods from England. The
dig analysis included our Chao botanical research to determine the
contents of pots and bottles, some of which still contained
the bird remains of food and drinks. There's also remains
(37:30):
of a cat, possibly kept in the store to catch
mice that would otherwise spoil the goods. Uh. And then
there was a link to the talk about all of this.
Thank you for all the hard work that goes into
researching and writing the shows. They're always interesting, even when
it isn't a topic with which I'm familiar, which is
lots ha ha. Take here and stay safe or not
to thank you so much for this email. I'm sorry
(37:51):
that I flagged it for follow up, and then I
didn't look at my follow up flags for a very
long time. Uh, and then I thought I need to
I need to make sure I haven't missed anything which
I had. So thank you so much for this note
and for telling us about these spines. If you would
like to send us a note, we're at History podcast
(38:12):
that I heart radio dot com and we're all over
social media at Missed in History. That's where you'll find
our Facebook and Twitter, and Pinterest in Instagram, and you
can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio
app and wherever else you like to take your podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
(38:32):
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy the Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. A while back,
I was wishing I had an episode to work on
that was something along the lines of the pilt Down Man.
(00:24):
The pilt Down Man was a case of scientific fraud.
It was a skull that was purportedly fossil evidence of
an evolutionary missing link, but really it was a total fabrication.
Threw a ranch into the study of human evolution. But
researching that one involved reading a lot of old science
writing in which people were very authoritatively saying stuff that
(00:45):
was totally wrong, and I just I enjoyed that research process.
I even talk in the episode of how I enjoyed
that process thanks to a totally random Jeopardy rerun that
I saw while I was visiting my parents. I had
an an idea for an episode that's almost the opposite
of The pilt Down Man, because it's about how when
(01:05):
European naturalists saw a platypus for the first time, it
was so bizarre to them that they thought it was fake.
Then they argued about how to classify the platypus in
the taxonomy of animals for almost a century. This was
happening in tandem with similar discussions about another Australian mammal,
(01:26):
which is the kidna or spiny ant eater, and it
was part of just discussions of the scientific taxonomy in general.
That's what we're going to talk about today. And just
as a heads up, European research into the anatomy and
morphology of these animals included shooting a lot of them.
Just be aware. So, the platypus is a mammal native
(01:48):
to Eastern Australia, Tasmania and the surrounding islands. They're fairly
unique in the animal world. And if you've never seen one,
but you have seen lots of more typical mammals, I
think it's seem incredibly weird. Yeah, if you're if you're
animal experience with mammals is like bears and cats and dogs,
(02:08):
you look at a platypus and you're like, what is this? Yeah,
I'll tell a story in our behind the scenes about
the first time I saw a platypus or an image
of a platypus. I should say, Okay, they have for
like a mammal, but a bill that looks like it
belongs on a bird, thus the name duck build platypus,
although that bill is really a sensory organ that's a
(02:29):
lot more flexible than a duck's bill. Males have spurs
on their hind legs that are equipped with venom glands,
something that's way more common among reptiles. Platypuses produce milk
to feed their young like other mammals do, but they
also lay eggs, which is something the overwhelming majority of
other mammals do not do. It's a quite a while
(02:53):
for European naturalists to figure out the whole milk production
and egg laying situation, which is going to be a
big part of this episode. But even without those details,
the platypus just seemed bizarre. In British Royal Navy officer
John Hunter, who would later become Governor of New South
(03:13):
Wales Colony, wrote that the platypus had come to be
thanks to quote a promiscuous intercourse between the different sexes
of all these different animals. In other words, lots of
different animals had mated with one another, and the platypus
was the result That sounds kind of cookie today. But
(03:33):
this was not just a random colonial officials rambling on
the subject. Hunter was a naturalist himself. He was a
member of the Royal Society. I mean I could see
where there's no other explanations. I probable my child logic
for where such animals came from, right, that would lead
you to that sort of conclusion. But of course Australia's
(03:54):
first people's have known about these animals for thousands of years.
The platypus has a role in the Aboriginal religious and
cultural knowledge that early anthropologists described as the dreaming or
the dream time. These stories and traditions from all across
the continent are deeply sacred to Aboriginal and tourist straight
islander people's, so they aren't really ours to share in
(04:16):
the podcast. But what we do want to stress here
is that a lot of what Europeans were arguing about
and trying to prove in the nineteenth century was already
commonly known among many Aboriginal communities. Scientists simultaneously relied on
Aboriginal people to help them find platypuses to study, and
also disregarded their knowledge about their physiology. One of the
(04:40):
reasons why the platypus was so baffling to Europeans and
the nineteenth century was that naturalists and anatomists and other
such specialists had been methodically cataloging and categorizing life on Earth,
starting primarily with Swedish naturalist Carlinaeus in his System and
a Tire or System of Nature. In seventeen thirty five,
(05:02):
Linnaeus created a taxonomy that arranged life into a hierarchy.
And this was a hierarchy that was based on observable
characteristics and traits. And this was not the world's first
attempt to classify and categorize life on Earth by any means.
There's evidence of classification systems in ancient Chinese and Egyptian texts,
(05:23):
and Aristotle and his contemporaries created basic taxonomies around the
third and four centuries b C. But Linnaeus established a
system that's at the heart of what's still used today.
It initially described three kingdoms, animal, vegetable and mineral, with
life in the plant and animal kingdoms arranged by class order, genus, species,
(05:45):
and variety. And as I said earlier, there was a
hierarchy to all of this. Animals were of the highest rank,
and then plants, and then minerals. This idea of a
hierarchy then carried through each of the kingdoms, so, for example,
well mammals were up at the top of the animals,
humans were up at the top of the mammals. These
(06:06):
hierarchical ideas also went on to form the basis of
scientific racism when they were used to categorize groups of
people from different parts of the world. In the tenth
edition of Systeminature, Linnaeus divided the animal world into mammalia
or mammals a vis or birds, amphibia or amphibians, which
(06:26):
also included reptiles, pisces or fish, insecta or insects, and vermes,
which translates to worms but was kind of a catch
all for invertebrate animals that also didn't have an exo skeleton.
Warm blooded animals whose hearts had to atrea and two
ventricles were mammals if they gave birth to live young,
(06:48):
and birds if they lay eggs. Cold blooded animals whose
hearts had one atrium and one ventricle were amphibians if
they breathe through lungs, and fish if they breathe through gills.
As he described each class in more detail. Linnaeus also
noted that mammals fed their young through lactiferous teets. The
(07:10):
Latin word mamma or breast, is the root of the
word mammal, So this all suggest that in Lenaeus's mind,
the key features of mammals what was worth naming them
after was milk production and females. Generally speaking, today's scientific
taxonomy has more categories at every level and more precise
(07:30):
methods for determining what goes where than Linnaeus's original work did.
But this progression has been about more than just adding
more specific and accurate factual details. Linnaeus and his contemporaries
were also working from the idea that life was just
as it had always been. The idea of evolution over
time did not really enter into it for more than
(07:52):
a century. Instead, Linnaeus framed his work as the categorization
of God's creations as God had made them, with that
work reflecting God's intentions. God had created all these plants
and animals. They had been in their present state from
the time of their creation, so by carefully examining them
(08:12):
in Linnaeus's mind, you could find an observable, sortable pattern
that demonstrated the will of God. So with that worldview
in mind, when Europeans started encountering some of Australia's more
unique wildlife, they really just did not know what to
make of it. They defied categorization. You can see this
(08:33):
confusion in one of the earliest written descriptions of the
platypus in English, in an Account of the English Colony
in New South Wales from its first settlement in seventy
eight to August eighteen o one, with remarks on the dispositions, customs, manners,
etcetera of the native inhabitants of that country, to which
are added some particulars of New Zealand. That was written
(08:56):
by David Collins. Collins had been born in London, had
arrived in Australia with the first fleet in seventeen eighties six,
and he served as Deputy Judge Advocate and eventually became
Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales. He published this book
in eighteen o two, and in volume two he listed
a number of the different animals that had been observed
(09:16):
in the colonies earliest years, before going on to say
that more recently, quote an amphibious animal of the mole
species had been spotted on the shore of a lake.
Collins went on to describe this animal, and that was
accompanied by a drawing of it by Captain John Hunter,
who by this point had become Governor of New South Wales.
(09:38):
Collins described the animal's small eyes and clawed, webbed feet
before saying quote, the tail of this animal was thick, short,
and very fat. But the most extraordinary circumstance observed in
its structure was its having, instead of the mouth of
an animal, the upper and lower mandibles of a duck.
By these it was enabled to supply it self with
(10:00):
food like that bird in muddy places or on the
banks of the lakes, in which its webbed feet enabled
it to swim. While on shore it's long and sharp
claws were employed in burrowing nature, thus providing for it
in its double or amphibious character. These little animals had
been frequently noticed rising to the surface of the water
(10:21):
and blowing like the turtle. So this was a mole
and a duck and a turtle. It's just not what
people were expecting when they showed up in Australia. When
naturalists in Europe received specimens of the platypus from Hunter,
They were similarly perplexed by what they were looking at,
and we will have more on that. After a quick
(10:42):
sponsor break in, Captain John Hunter sent a sketch of
the water mole to the Literary and Philosophical Society d
in Newcastle upon time, along with a preserved skin from
(11:04):
one of the animals. This made its way to George Shaw,
keeper of the Natural History collections at the British Museum
which is now the Natural History Museum, but at first
Show was really not convinced that the skin that he
had received was authentic. He very carefully started looking for
signs of stitching, thinking that maybe had somebody had sowed
(11:25):
a duck's bill onto a mole's body. Of course, he
found no such evidence, because it was a platypus in
se Shaw teamed up with illustrator Frederick P. Noder to
produce the Naturalist's Miscellany, or colored figures of natural objects
drawn and described immediately from nature. In this Shaw wrote, quote,
(11:48):
of all the mammalia yet known, it seems the most
extraordinary in its confirmation, exhibiting the perfect resemblance of the
beak of a duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped.
So accurate is the similitude that, at first view it
naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means.
(12:09):
The very epidermist proportions seratures, manner of opening, and other particulars,
is the beak of a shoveler or other broad builled
species of duck presenting themselves to the view. Nor is it,
without the most minute and rigid examination, that we can
persuade ourselves of its being the real beak or snout
of a quadruped. This work goes on to say, quote,
(12:33):
the body is depressed and has some resemblance to that
of an otter in miniature. It is covered with a
very thick, soft and beaver like fur, and is of
a moderately dark brown above subfruginous white beneath. The head
is flattish and rather small than large. The mouth or snout,
as before observed, so exactly resembles that of some broad
(12:55):
build species of duck, that it might be mistaken for such.
Shaw's doubts about what he's looking at are clear. He
wrote quote on a subject so extraordinarily as the present,
A degree of skepticism is not only pardonable but laudable.
And I ought, perhaps to acknowledge that I almost doubt
the testimony of my own eyes with respect to the
(13:18):
structure of this animal's beak. Yet must confess that I
can perceive no appearance of any deceptive preparation. And the
edges of the rictus, the insertion, etcetera, when tried by
the test of maceration in water, so as to render
every part completely movable, seemed perfectly natural. Nor can the
(13:39):
most accurate examination of expert anatomists discover any deception in
this particular. Shaw's work here predated David Collins's account of
the English colony that we read from earlier, so this
was the first thorough description of a platypus and English writing.
Shaw also made the first attempt at giving this animal
(13:59):
a name, which was Platypus anatoust which roughly translated to
flat footed duck. In eighteen hundred, Thomas Buick published a
wood engraving of a platypus in the adenda to the
fourth edition of A General History of Quadrupeds. He didn't
name the animal, though the engraving was just titled an
(14:20):
amphibious Animal. In the adenda, he described both the amphibious
animal and the wombat, which he calls a wombatch. With
ach ending. He says the aquatic animal quote seems to
be an animal, Suey Gennaris. It appears to possess a
threefold nature, that of a fish, a bird, and a quadruped,
and it is related to nothing that we have hitherto seen.
(14:42):
We shall not attempt to arrange it in any of
the useful modes of classification, but content ourselves with giving
the description of both these curious animals as they have
been transmitted to us. Suey Gennaris means unique. In eighteen hundred,
also German physician and naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach received a
(15:03):
platypus skin from Hunter as well. He did his own
study of it, and since he knew the name platypus
had already been used on a type of beetle in,
he chose a different name, Ornithoryncus paradoxus, or paradoxical bird snout.
Eventually this became Ornithoryncus anatinus, combining the genus that Blumenbach
(15:25):
had coined with the species from Shaw's name. Even though
platypus was only briefly part of the proposed scientific name
for this animal. It really stuck around as the common
name it outlasted. Lots of other names were things like
water mole. It just don't have the same beautiful ring.
These were by far not the only Europeans trying to
study the platypus, something that was inherently challenging. Most of
(15:49):
them could not personally make the trip to Australia, and
they were practically on the other side of the planet
from where platypuses were, so they had to rely on
specimens scent by but living in Australia or procured by
expeditions to the continent. In addition to the time and
effort involved with that, specimens were often damaged in transit.
(16:10):
The first skin that George Shaw received was pretty badly
desiccated by the time he got it. Plus, the ships
that carried these specimens to Europe typically traveled through waters
that were also home to ships from Eastern Asia, where
people were known to use taxidermy to create really convincing
representations of hybrid animals. These included things like P. T.
(16:32):
Barnum's Fiji Mermaid, which was the head and torso of
a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish and
was reportedly purchased from Japanese sailors. The platypus itself already
seemed like an improbable animal, so the existence of these
Taxi Army specimens at it just a whole layer of
complication and skepticism. Whenever people received do specimens, and when
(16:55):
researchers did get their hands on equality specimen to study,
sometimes their findings just made things even more confusing. Outwardly,
the platypus looked mostly like a mammal except for that
bird like bill. But in eighteen o two, British surgeon
and Royal Society fellow Sir Everard Home dissected a platypus
(17:16):
and found that the male had internal testes, that is
a trait that's common to reptiles, not mammals. He also
found that both males and females had a cloaca, that is,
one orifice to the outside of the body for both
digestive waste and for reproductive products. That was again something
that had been found in birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish,
(17:40):
but not in mammals. Not long after Home published work
on these discoveries, Etienne Jeffroy Saint Hilaire of France coined
the term monetary to describe both the platypus and the Echidnea,
deriving the name from Home's discovery of these animals having
a cloaca. He suggested the monotreams belonged in their own class,
(18:02):
which he named monotrema. The presence of a cloaca raised
lots of questions about platypus reproduction. Sir Joseph Banks tasked
botanical collector George Kayley with going to Australia to look
into these questions for both the platypus and the Achidna.
Kayley developed relationships with Aboriginal people to try to learn
what they already knew. In a eight O three he
(18:25):
wrote to Banks to say that one man had told
him that the platypus laid eggs deep underground, but he
had no physical evidence to prove it. And another pressing
question was whether platypus is produced milk to feed their young.
According to scientific understanding at the time, only mammals did that.
But if platypus has laid eggs, as Kaylee's source had reported, then,
(18:48):
according to the then current understanding, no mammals did that.
As a side note, there are some birds that produce
a milk like substance in a part of their esophagus
known as the crop. It's no as crop milk or
pigeon milk, and it plays a similar role to mammals
milk and nourishing young in the earliest days of their life.
But that is not what we're talking about here. Now.
(19:09):
That is a different thing. Because of these questions about
eggs and milk, though, various experts took the same approach
as Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire had done, proposing that the
platypus belonged in the entirely new category. Jehan Baptiste la
Barc of France proposed the new class called proto Heria
in eighteen o nine for both platypuses and a kidneys,
(19:33):
and French zoologist Johann Carl Wilhelm Illiger proposed one called
Reptantia in eighteen eleven. In eighteen seventeen, French scientist George
Cuvier placed the platypus and the echidna in a new
genus within the order eden Tata, which was already home
to ant eaters and splats, but Cuvier also noted there
(19:54):
still needed to be an examination of these purported eggs.
We have mostly been talking about people working from Europe,
but researchers were at work in Australia as well. Botanical
collector Sir John Jamison was born in Ireland and moved
to Australia after inheriting property there in eighteen eleven. In
eighteen sixteen, he wrote of the platypus quote the female
(20:16):
is oviparous and lives in burrows in the ground, so
that it is seldom seen either on shore or in
the water. This was based on his own observations and
he was both respected and trained in medicine. But the
scientific community still wanted proof, and that was challenging because
those burrows which did exist were hard to find and
(20:38):
hard to get into. In the eighteen twenties, German anatomus
Johann Meckel published four influential studies on the platypus. He
described the venom gland in males and the mammary glands
and females, although he didn't see any signs of those
mammary glands being connected to nipples. Then, in eighteen thirty two,
(20:58):
Lauderdale Maud of Scotland published two papers describing both the
mammary glands and the milk production in a live platypus
British comparative. Anatomist Richard Owen, who would go on to
coin the term dinosaur, confirmed the presence of mammary glands
in his own paper in eighteen thirty two, including noting
(21:19):
that they seemed to be enlarged in specimens that also
showed evidence of having recent activity in their ovaries. That
in eighteen thirty three, biologist George Bennett discovered that platypus
milk left the body through pores, sort of like sweat does,
and then it collected on the abdomen for the young
(21:39):
to drink. For some naturalists, this added up to conclusive
evidence that the platypus lactated, and only mammals lactate, so
platypuses were definitely mammals, and at least for some, that
was also enough to answer the question of platypuses laid eggs,
because mammals do not lay eggs, so if platypuses were mammals,
(22:00):
they did not lay eggs. But others, including Etienne Jeffrey,
concluded that Michael and mad had to be mistaken. Maybe
those glands were producing some kind of skin lubricant rather
than milk. This is kind of the same logic, only
in reverse. Jeffrey had concluded that platypuses lay eggs, and
that meant that they simply could not produce milk. It
(22:22):
was impossible your if then statements are all messy. This
led to a lot of division and dispute among naturalists,
as various men who had published work on platypuses tried
to defend their reputations in the face of other seemingly
contradictory work, and of course most of this was ignoring
(22:43):
the observations of Aboriginal people and at this point some
European colonists who reported the platypuses definitely laid eggs. To
be clear, this testimony was not always consistent. There were
language and cultural barriers at work, among other things. But overall,
besides just wanting physical evidences proof, the scientific community was
(23:06):
generally dismissive of anything Aboriginal people reported. Charles Darwin stopped
in Sydney in eighteen thirty six at the end of
his voyage aboard the Beagle. While in Australia, he saw
platypuses for himself, including one that had been shot by
a member of his expedition, and in the years that followed,
Platypuss came up in his letters to his colleagues as
(23:28):
he was sort of thinking through his ideas on natural selection.
Darwin later used the platypus as an example in on
the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty nine, in a
discussion of how animals traits influenced how people classified them,
even if those traits were not necessarily the most important ones.
(23:50):
Quote if the orna thorncas had been covered with feathers
instead of hair, this external and trifling character would I
think have been considered by naturalists as important an aid
in determining the degree of affinity of this strange creature
to birds and reptiles, as an approach instructure in anyone
internal and important organ The work of Darwin and his
(24:13):
successors would eventually put the platypus in context based on
how it evolved over time and how that was related
to the evolution of other animals. But in eighteen thirty six,
when he was in Sydney, there were still far more
questions than answers and we'll talk more about that after
we pause for a sponsor break. As we said earlier,
(24:42):
some nineteenth century researchers saw lactation and egg laying as
mutually exclusive animals simply could not do both of those things.
But for others establishing that the platypus did lactate, that
didn't rule out egg laying. Instead, it made this an
e been more important question to definitively answer. But eyewitness
(25:04):
testimony of platypuses with eggs was not enough, because it's like,
what if those were some other animals eggs and the
platypus just happened to be near them. I mean, that's
a sure that could happen. Sometimes people found egg fragments
in platypus burrows, but that also wasn't conclusive, because theoretically
(25:24):
a platypus might eat eggs, those could be the remnants
of its food. So researchers wanted to find a pregnant
platypus or one in the process of laying an egg,
or an egg that contained what was clearly a developing
platypus embryo. Researchers had already killed a lot of platypuses
for research in the first decades of the nineteenth century,
(25:47):
but attempts to meet these specific criteria led them to
kill a lot more Yeah, and it was more specifically
destructive because they were specifically looking for females. We mentioned
earlier that cleverly made East Asian taxid army specimens had
led to some skepticism about whether platypus specimens were genuine,
(26:09):
and when it came to this question of whether platypuses
lay eggs, incorrect eggs specimens had the same effect. Both
Aboriginal people and colonists submitted samples that were purportedly platypus eggs,
but they turned out to belong to completely different animals,
including tortoises, lizards, and snakes. It's really not clear whether
(26:31):
any of this was intentional or just a case of
mistaken identity. Also, the question wasn't just do platypuses lay
eggs or do they give birth to live young. Some
animals are ovo viviparous, meaning they produce eggs, but the
eggs develop inside the mother's body, either hatching inside the
body or immediately after the egg is laid. So did
(26:54):
the platypus give birth to live young that had been
nourished through a placenta like a mammal, or did the
platypus produce eggs? And if eggs were involved, did they
develop and hatch inside or outside the body? Past podcast
subject Jules Verreaux is going to be an upcoming Saturday
Classic spent fifteen months in Tasmania, much of that time
(27:17):
studying platypuses. Based on this research, he concluded that the
platypus was over viviparous in He also wrote, quote the
order the rincus as an animal bizarre of structure and
offers numerous analogies with a host of different species and
even classes. And its external form it resembles in some
(27:37):
degree the mole as to its body, the beaver as
to its tail, and the duck as to its beak.
Its internal structure, more astonishing, still resembles that of certain
reptiles and appears to form a link between mammals and lizards.
Richard Owen directed George Bennett of the Australian Museum to
hunt for female platypuses either pregnant or with eggs. Bennett
(28:01):
had previously dissected female platypuses and found eggs in their uteruses,
but none of those eggs contained any embryos, so they
didn't offer any insight into whether the young might hatch
from eggs or be born alive. But Bennett was concerned
about this idea, fearing for the future of the species
if researchers indiscriminately killed females to try to answer this
(28:23):
egg question. Bennett was also concerned about the killing of
Australian animals more generally. In eighteen sixty he wrote Gatherings
of a Naturalist in Australasia being observations principally on the
animal and vegetable productions of New South Wales, New Zealand
and some of the austral Islands, And in the preface
(28:44):
to this he said, quote, unless the hand of man
be stayed from their destruction, the ornitho ryncus and the echidna,
the emu and the megapodius, like the dodo moa, and
no tortoise will shortly exist only in the pages of
the natural list. The effort to find platypus eggs or
pregnant platypus is continued for decades without clear success. Then
(29:08):
in eighteen sixty four, two miners brought a female platypus
to gold receiver George Rumby. Rumby reported that she laid
two eggs while closed up in a gin create, but
he wasn't sure that this was normal for the platypus.
He thought that the fear involved with being shut up
in that gin create may have caused her to essentially
(29:29):
miscarry her eggs. In eighteen eighty two, British biologist and
embryologist Francis Maitland Balfour, known as Frank, suggested that William
Hay Calledwell traveled to Australia to study the egg question.
Caldwell had graduated from Cambridge in eighteen eighty and had
been teaching comparative anatomy. Not long after Balfour made this suggestion,
(29:52):
he died while mountain climbing in the Swiss Alps. A
Traveling Studentship was named in his honor, and Caldwell became
its first recipient. Caldwell used the money and prestige that
came with the studentship, along with the backing of the
Royal Society, to travel to Australia and to study several
of its animals, including platypus, is kidneas and lungfish. On
(30:15):
August nine four, after a four months search assisted by
Aboriginal people, Calledwell shot a female platypus. There was an
egg nearby, one that was presumably hers. He also found
an egg in the mouth of her uterus, which he
described as being at a stage equal to a thirty
(30:36):
six hour chick. Caldwell reported his findings through a telegram
that read quote monotreums oviparous ovum merro blastic. Merro Blastic
is a term used to describe an egg's cleavage after
it's been fertilized, So in lay terms, this essentially said
monotreams lay eggs, and their eggs contain lots of yolk.
(30:57):
Caldwell's message was passed along to a professor he knew
at Sydney University, and from there to the British Association
for the Advancement of Science meeting that was convening in Montreal,
and then just a day after Calledwell's find, William Hawk,
who was curator of the South Australian Museum, also found
an eggshell in an achidnas pouch that led to confirmation
(31:21):
that a kidnas also lay eggs. Pack presented his observation
to the Royal Society of South Australia and Adelaide on
the same day that Calledwell's discovery was announced at the
British Association of the Advancement of Science meeting. Both those
things happened on September two four. This finally conclusively answered
(31:43):
the question of whether platypuses lay eggs. Yes, they do,
and so do a kidnas. Today there are only five
species of mammal known to lay eggs, which are platypuses,
and then four different species of a kidnam. All of
them are native to the Australian continent and it surrounding islands,
and from an evolutionary standpoint, it's likely that they split
(32:04):
off from other mammals more than two hundred million years ago.
It was only after that point that other mammals evolved
to give birth to live young. After his discovery of
platypus eggs, Caldwell went on to do some incredibly destructive
research into a kidness. He employed a huge team of
Aboriginal people who captured and killed and estimated twelve hundred
(32:27):
to four hundred kidnap between July and August of five.
Caldwell's writing suggests that at least some of these were
being used for food, but he was definitely encouraging this
by paying them half a crown for each female specimen
that they brought to him. He also wrote about this
aboriginal crew in a really disparaging way, and he exploited
(32:49):
them by raising the prices on the flour, sugar and
tea that he sold to them based on how much
he had paid them for a kidneys specimens. So if
you brought him more specimens, he would will sell you
the same amount of tea or sugar or whatever, but
at a higher price based on how much he had
paid for those animals. What a gym uh. This research
(33:09):
into the nature of the platypus had taken ninety five
years and an enormous amount of effort. In the words
of George Bennett, quote of all the Australian mammalia, none
has excited so much attention as the platypus or water mole,
both from its peculiar form and the great desire events
to ascertain the habits and economy of so singular a creature.
(33:32):
He went on to say, quote, perhaps no animal in
its first introduction into Europe, ever, gave rise to greater
doubts as to its classification or excited deeper interests among naturalists,
and interest fully maintained to the present day respecting its
habits and economy than this enigmatical creature, which, from its
(33:52):
external appearance as well as internal anatomy, may correctly be
described as forming a connecting link between quadruped the bird
and the reptile. Bennett wrote that in eighteen sixty, but
that part about quote an interest fully maintained to the
present day is still true. There's still a ton of
ongoing research into the platypus, including the discovery that the
(34:16):
platypus has biofluorescent fur that was announced in so As.
We noted a lot of platypuses were killed during this
research and also through hunting, habitat loss, and other factors
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eventually, though every
Australian state passed conservation laws to protect the platypus. The
(34:37):
last of those laws went into effect in nineteen twelve.
So today platypuses are listed as near threatened on the
International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species.
Not the most upbeat place to land an episode, no,
but I mean it's better than they're being think. I
(35:00):
don't know if that uh. My point being, do you
have a beat listener mail to accompany this? I do
have listener mail. I have listener mail that is about Australia.
UM something. I didn't make the connection until just now
because I had two different listener mails to go with
two different episodes, and I did not pay attention to
which I put with which. So thanks for nota for
(35:22):
this email that turned out to be super related to
this episode. UH this says this was written back in
August after an earlier Unearthed episode, and I flagged it
to read on the show, and then I didn't read it,
so nada said Dear Holly and Tracy, I hope this
email finds you both well during these strange and unusual times.
(35:44):
I've just caught up on the July Unearthed episodes, as
I usually listen to podcasts while i'm driving, but I'm
in lockdown in Melbourne, Australia and haven't really been going
many places. I came across this interesting talk about archaeological
digs taking place in Melbourne, and I thought it might
be interesting for the Edibles Impotable section of the next Unearthed. Uh.
(36:06):
I forgot to come back to it in time for
the next on Earth, so I'm reading it now. There's
a big infrastructure project currently on the go, and as
part of the excavations for a new train station, the
Victorian government conducted archaeological digs on the site prior to
commencing construction work. This particular site was right at the
(36:26):
heart of early Melbourne, including a cottage owned by the
man who founded the city, John Batman. Side note Melbourne
was almost called bat Mania after him. One of the
places they were excavating had been a general store in
the eighteen fifties, but suffered a catastrophic fire in eighteen
fifty five. The shop was destroyed and much of the
remains fell into the underground cellar, which was also full
(36:48):
of stock. The fire was so destructive that they pretty
much just covered over the seller and built over the top.
The excavations revealed to look at an eighteen fifties grocery store,
with everything in the cellar base sickly untouched since the
night of the fire. This allowed insight into how grocery
stores arranged their stock and also what kinds of items
they were stalking Melbourne in the eighteen fifties was a
(37:09):
frontier town, having only been established twenty years prior. Yet
the shop with stocking a range of foods, including relatively
exotic fruits, as well as luxury goods from England. The
dig analysis included our Chao botanical research to determine the
contents of pots and bottles, some of which still contained
the bird remains of food and drinks. There's also remains
(37:30):
of a cat, possibly kept in the store to catch
mice that would otherwise spoil the goods. Uh. And then
there was a link to the talk about all of this.
Thank you for all the hard work that goes into
researching and writing the shows. They're always interesting, even when
it isn't a topic with which I'm familiar, which is
lots ha ha. Take here and stay safe or not
to thank you so much for this email. I'm sorry
(37:51):
that I flagged it for follow up, and then I
didn't look at my follow up flags for a very
long time. Uh, and then I thought I need to
I need to make sure I haven't missed anything which
I had. So thank you so much for this note
and for telling us about these spines. If you would
like to send us a note, we're at History podcast
(38:12):
that I heart radio dot com and we're all over
social media at Missed in History. That's where you'll find
our Facebook and Twitter, and Pinterest in Instagram, and you
can subscribe to our show on the I heart radio
app and wherever else you like to take your podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
(38:32):
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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