Jack Ashby

That was the biggest...

that it took nearly 90 years to prove that platypuses and echidnas lay eggs.

What?

Didn't they just go and look at it?

Well, I mean, first thing to say is, obviously, the first colonists were asking indigenous Australians, how do they reproduce?

And indigenous Australians were saying, they lay eggs.

And they go, oh, he's pulling my leg.

They just didn't believe it.

Exactly.

They just dismissed the people who obviously known these species for 60,000 years or more.

Absolutely.

And so people were collecting platypuses and trying to... It was one of the biggest controversies of the 19th century, partly because...

it was so tied up with the idea of does evolution happen?

So Darwin's theory was published in 1859.

So that 90-year fight for the platypus egglings, right, kind of surrounds Darwin's publication.

But I think there were people who just weren't willing to accept that something that looked like a mammal could do something so kind of primitive, if you like, a reptilian dragging our noble class down into the mud with belly-dragging animals.

frogs and lizards and things like that and just in a kind of political social idea oh because we're mammals right because we're mammals right um and also that just the idea that if you've got a group that shows some kind of reptile-like characteristics and some mammal-like characteristics so fur and eggs for example um that would lend weight to the idea that species do change that it's a kind of

intermediate, which is not how we look at platypuses and echidnas now, but it's got features of both groups, which really adds weight to the evolution is true idea.

Exactly.

They just, they broke the rules.