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Platypus

Ornithorhynchus anatinus · medium

When the first platypus specimen reached London, several naturalists assumed a hoax: a duck's bill sewn onto the body of a mole. The animal is genuinely as improbable as that. It is a mammal that lays eggs, has no teats and instead sweats milk through patches of skin, and carries venom — the male has a spur on each hind ankle capable of causing pain severe enough to resist morphine.

The bill is the most sophisticated part of it. Platypuses hunt with their eyes, ears and nostrils sealed shut underwater, navigating entirely by electroreception: thousands of receptors in the bill detect the faint electrical fields generated by the muscle activity of shrimp, insect larvae and small crustaceans in the streambed. Very few mammals can do this at all, and none does it as well.

They live in freshwater systems along the eastern side of Australia, digging burrows into the banks and feeding mostly at dawn and dusk. Genetic work has confirmed how ancient the lineage is — monotremes split from other mammals well over a hundred million years ago, so the platypus is not a primitive draft of a mammal but a long, separate experiment that happens to have survived.

Where it lives

Worml lists the platypus as native to Australia. Its habitat is freshwater rivers and streams of the eastern ranges.

Ranges here are reduced to whole countries for playability and exclude introduced populations — see about the data for what that simplification leaves out.

In the game

Platypus is rated medium. To solve the round you need to name the single country it lives in. How scoring works →

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