If you're like me, you were fascinated by cryptozoology and the eccentric animals of Australia as a kid. Ok, maybe I didn't know the term cryptozoology until I was past my dinosaur period, but what I'm getting at is: Who doesn't like a platypus?So when this story ran in the Washington Post the other day, I knew I'd have to blog about it. At some point after second grade, I must have forgotten that the platypus wasn't discovered until 1799. Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if people in Tasmania knew about them in the same way that the folks in Madagascar were aware of the coelacanth, that is: food. What I knew about platypi (I prefer the Latin plural) was that they were mammals that laid eggs, they make milk but have no nipples, and they have poison for a defense mechanism like a snake. Yes sirree, the platypus is one interesting animal.
Now, it turns out they're even more interesting than was previously imagined. They have approximately as many genes as humans and two-thirds more molecular bits of DNA (sorry if I'm dumbing it down). "The genome was completely unknown, and we knew it was going to be fairly weird," said Jennifer Marshall Graves of Australian National University in Canberra, who led part of the analysis after the St. Louis team derived the basic sequence. "You'd look at some of these repetitive sequences and think, 'What on Earth is that?' "
What on Earth indeed! These creatures can't even be straight forward in determining sex. For all those folks who freak out at the seeming variety of sexual preferences people exhibit, watch out for the platypus. Where we have X and Y chromosomes (double X for females, XY for males), the platypus has ten different chromosomes!
For all my forgetfulness, I'm fairly certain that I never knew about this final point: Poet Ogden Nash appreciated the platypus. He wrote:
I like the way it raises its family
Partly birdly, partly mammaly
Amen, Odgen.
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