“It’s the meal for this night,” Neil Morley explains, “based on fresh water crayfishes, flour larvae, and boiled eggs, kneaded with some milk, yoghurt and vitamins. It looks like rubbish, and I ask, curious, what it is. While I am observing them, guided by the director, an attendant comes, raises the grating, and throws inside the contents of a bucket. Two tunnels, just over the surface of the water, lead to the artificial dens placed in the rear of the building, in a calm area, closed to public, and another succession of tunnels connects them with some pools under the open sky, covered by a grating. Large wall panels narrate their life and anatomy, while a loudspeaker explains, in simple wordings, the biology and behaviour of these incredible animals to visitors. A complex with a large exposition basin, where swims, at fixed timings, a couple of duckbills.

This huge zoological park, dedicated to Australian fauna, has the best equipped “Platypus house”, in the world. “And, furthermore,”, explains to me Neil Morley, director of the famous Sir Collin MacKenzie Sanctuary of Healesville, Australia, the only site in the world where these animals have reproduced in captivity, “males have, like serpents, on the back paws, a venomous gland connected to a spur.”

It’s the famous wire, with which, in 1884, the scholar Caldwell, informed the Zoological British Society, gathered in Montreal, that the Duck billed Platypus, ( Ornithorhynchus anatinus), lays, as birds do, eggs with yolk.Īnd when the first specimen, embalmed, arrived in Europe, many, at the British Museum of London, thought it was a joke: a beaver with a bill similar to the one of a duck, two small eyes and web footed, by sure, did not look true. They are all oviparous, classified in the “monotremes” (literally, “unique hole”), because, as for the birds, the amphibians and the reptiles, the tract of their urogenital apparatus and the alimentary duct converge in only one hind orifice, called cloaca. It’s like if, within hundred millions years, somebody would like to look for the marks of our civilization among the fossils of a car: by sure he could find the bonnet of the Volkswagen, some parts of a mini and some super mini cars, produced for years in large quantity, but couldn’t find any trace of the prototypes, the cars by Cugnot, Stafford or Panhard.Īnd yet, still now left alone in the Australian region, do live some “mammals in transit”, incredibly survived, flesh and blood, to the competition of developed species. Hot blood reptiles, furred birds, mammals which lay eggs: reality had surely to overcome our imagination, even if not too much has remained of all these forms passing by. We know that birds and reptiles are near relatives but these had to be quite different from the present ones, and when, 200 millions of years ago, the first mammals tried new ways, the separations between the groups were not too much definite. There are animals, like the scorpion, suitable for every geological “season”, and practically unchanged since 400 millions of years, but the most part of the living beings, has a suffered history, where well-suited intuitions, and successive reconversions interlace with hard struggles and failures.īlind alleys of the life, extinct species, quickly deleted by an evolution which never proceeds in a direct line, which never closes all the doors, and goes forward reeling, by attempts.Īlmost always, the origins hide under the beginnings, and the “prototypes”, generally don’t leave any trace in the fossils. It has the muzzle of a duck but the fur of a beaver, it lays eggs but suckles its babies, it is gentle but can deploy a poisonous spur, it falls ill from minimal stress but has lived from time immemorial.

A real platypus