Dr. Tahneal Hawke
speaker
648 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 23 Jun
Dr. Tahneal Hawke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Okay.
What?
Yeah.
They're different to mammals in the fact that platypuses don't have any nipples, but they still produce milk for their young.
So what's kind of happening is when the female is in that burrow with her young,
She's kind of laying on her side and she's just excreting milk through her skin, essentially.
And then the baby platypuses are kind of there, just lapping it up from the stomach.
Yeah, so they're monotremes.
So essentially, that means they're a group of mammals whose ancestors have kind of retained these traits like egg laying, which is a feature lost by what we see in marsupial and placenta.
animals.
So it's like an ancient characteristic that's shared with birds and reptiles.
It's evolved before the development of live birth.
So that kind of explains what some people see as primitive egg laying traits.
I tend to refer to it more as not primitive, but it's a survivor of an ancient lineage that's evolved separately from other mammals.
So, you know, it has all these weird features, the spurs, the eggs, and then a lot of the others are kind of adapted to its environment.
Like we see, you know, the webbing that we were talking about, the nails that they use to dig and walk on land.
And then this bill is obviously highly adapted to the waterways and the food that it's eating.
Yeah.
It has a real mix of morphological and evolutionary traits that come together and make this super unique animal.
Yeah.
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