Jack Ashby

Duck mole.

Duck mole.

It's kind of perfect.

But then...

First to say that, so Hunter is kind of given credit for discovering the platypus and for collecting this platypus and kind of ignoring the fact that it was, of course, a Darrow command.

Who speared it and found it and put it in front of him, yes.

Exactly.

And so then Hunter ships it off in a barrel to firstly to Joseph Banks, whose name is written all over the natural history of Australia in the last 250 years, and then asking him to take it to the Royal Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle upon Tyne, which is a

town in the northeast of England.

And in its barrel, so it was in a barrel of spirits, was a wombat that Hunter had also tried to keep alive.

And it died after six weeks because Hunter failed to work out what it ate, which I find quite surprising because, you know, wombats eat grass and sedges and other things like that.

But then it arrived in Newcastle and it was carried to the... What, like a pickled wombat and a pickled platypus in the same barrel?

In the same barrel, yeah.

Complete except for their guts that he'd sent them over.

And he's... Unfortunately, the story goes that there's a woman whose name has not been recorded carrying the barrel on her head to the society's meeting rooms.

And as she entered the building, it smashed...

And she was drenched in pungent spirits.

And I mean, yeah, she was one of the first Europeans ever to touch a platypus as it whacked her on the head on the way down.

And, you know, and a 30 kilo wombat, which is presumably slightly more dangerous.

Exactly, yeah.