Jack Ashby

And my lecturer, Adrian Friday, who's still around the museum, kind of absolutely sparked this...

These are the most amazing animals that have ever evolved, I thought, for me.

And they are absolutely stunning.

And then platypuses and echidnas acted as a kind of gateway drug for me into the rest of Australian mammals.

Why did you love them so much?

They are astonishing.

The things they can do are kind of unlike pretty much any other mammal on Earth.

And they're kind of an evolutionary biologist's dream because they've got features... Evolution works by starting at its starting point in whatever group you're looking at and then kind of adding or subtracting from there.

And platypuses have retained some features that other mammals haven't retained, like walking with bent elbows and knees and...

Laying eggs, obviously.

But on top of that, I've layered these absolutely astonishing adaptations that you don't see elsewhere.

Has there been a shift or something?

Well, this was a major conundrum when platypuses and echidnas were first encountered by Europeans in the 1790s because...

So I'm pretty sure you weren't at school in the 1790s, but the rules by which naturalists had arranged the world didn't allow for platypuses and echidnas to be considered mammals.

But it was really confusing because they had fur, which was a defining feature of mammals, remains a defining feature of mammals.

They suckle their young, but with platypuses and echidnas, because they don't have nipples, it took a really long time to prove that indeed they do produce milk.

Sorry, they suckle without nipples?

That must hurt.

Well, I guess it hurts less because what they're doing is they're almost sweating their milk out.

Really?