Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Jack Ashby is a British zoologist from Cambridge University's Zoological Museum who writes very candidly, If I sound excited about platypuses, it's because I am. Jack Ashby is fascinated by the utterly distinctive creatures that have evolved on our island continent. but nothing delights him as much as platypuses.
And it is platypuses, by the way, not platypi, because it's a Greek word and not a Latin one. The British, when they first came to Australia, were confounded by the platypus, a creature that has a body like a mole, a bill like a duck, and feet like an otter, that lays eggs and yet suckles its young.
Chapter 2: What sparked Jack Ashby's fascination with the platypus?
Well, all that just threw out all their systems of animal classification out of whack. And the way they and the rest of the world dealt with their confusion was to all too often disparage Australia's wildlife as weird or even primitive. Australia was seen by them as a place with joke animals and, alarmingly, no pre-existing humans.
Well, Jack Ashby doesn't think this is a very grown-up way to look at things. He sees platypuses and echidnas and Tasmanian devils and all our other creatures as noble, beautiful and fascinating. And he wants the world to know all about them. Jack's book is called Platypus Matters, The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals. Hi, Jack. Hi, Richard. Thanks for having me today.
Your museum in Cambridge, this is Darwin's museum. What kind of stuff have you got in that museum?
We've got about two million specimens covering the whole of the animal kingdom, the whole of geological time, or biological time, I should say, the whole of the world. So, as you say, we've got a lot of Darwin specimens here. He was a student at Cambridge for a few years, and...
ended up leaving his collections to the Cambridge Philosophical Society, which is one of the founding parts of our museum.
So you've got stuff there from the voyage of the Beagle. Have you got like a turtle or something or a tortoise from the Beagle?
We have, and we've got... What Darwin did when he came back from the Beagle is to partition off different groups of animals to different experts in those fields. And we ended up, or Cambridge ended up, with the fishes, which might not be the sexiest part of the Beagle collection, but... So we've got Darwin's Fishes from the Beagle.
We've also got the finches that came back from the Beagle, which are probably the most famous thing to come off the Beagle because Darwin's finches, I'm doing air quotes around Darwin's finches here, are perhaps the best example of how evolution worked in Darwin's eyes. So these are... The Galapagos finches.
A finch, it turns out, or one species of finch, flew from South America to the Galapagos Islands and there evolved into 14 different species with different beaks. Some beaks for big nut-cracking beaks for smashing seeds. Some really fine beaks for pecking flowers. And And Darwin used this as an example of adaptive radiation, to say this is how it evolved.
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Chapter 3: How did early Europeans react to the discovery of the platypus?
But the reason I did air quotes is because our finches aren't actually collected by Darwin. They were collected by the captain Fitzroy and one of the crew, Fuller, who actually did a far better job than Darwin of labelling the specimens and where they came from.
So you're surrounded by all these wonderful specimens, and yet, and yet, and yet for you, it was the platypus that entirely enchanted you, Jack. Tell me about this platypus. What was the first one you saw, and how did you become so enchanted by it?
The first platypus specimen I saw was actually in the museum in which I now work in Cambridge as an undergraduate many years ago. And our course in zoology was essentially you were given one group of animals per week and we'd have a load of lectures about that group and then we'd go to the museum for practical sessions with the specimens.
So this was the week they wheeled out the monitorings, was it?
Absolutely. 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.
When I was talking about this with my producer Nicola earlier on, she and I both distinctly recall in school when we were kids being taught that monotremes were not mammals. Now, we both have memories of this in school, and we're going back some decades now, I'm afraid to say, Jack, in this case. And so it's interesting to hear you call them mammals.
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.
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Chapter 4: What unique characteristics define the platypus as a mammal?
Yes, exactly. So they kind of work like a metal detectorist, sweeping their bills around. If you watch them, it's very back and forth. They're also very, very sensitive to touch, so they can feel things too. They don't need to use electricity all the time.
So once they've caught the prey in their bill, how do they actually grind it up?
So this is a great story, I think. Firstly, they have pouches like a hamster. So whilst they're underwater, they stuff all their food into their cheeks, cheek pouches. And then once they only eat on the surface. And as I'm sure anyone who's been to the dentist knows, teeth are a really bad idea. You know, like... Sure, they can grind things up, but if they get damaged, it's kind of game over.
It's extremely unpleasant. And platypuses eat really hard foods. They smash many, many crayfishes a day. But what they've done is they've evolved from animals with teeth. And in fact, platypuses are hatched. grow tiny little teeth and then reabsorb them. So they definitely evolve from animals with teeth.
But what they've done is, they're adults, as they don't have teeth, they've evolved these horny ridges. They look like a kind of comb on its side. And they're made of horns, they're made of keratin, so the same as our fingernails and our hair. And these are constantly regrowing ridges. So they're really tough. They can grind up...
crayfish and mollusks and whatever else they might eat and just constantly regrow. So it's a fantastic evolutionary adaptation.
So would they sit in the side of their mouths? Where their teeth would be. Where their teeth would be. In their beak. And they're like these regrowing plates then, are they? Yeah. That can crush crayfish.
Yeah. Wow. And they're really bumpy. They look like a comb. Well, if this is such a good thing, why don't we have these things? That's a great question. We don't know. We don't know. I think it's so weird that so few mammals... A conspiracy of dentists that keep the whole teeth thing going, perhaps?
Only one mammal, as far as we know, has evolved ever-replacing teeth, and actually that's a species of wallaby.
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Chapter 5: Why is the platypus considered an evolutionary enigma?
So they'll start grooming and they're super flexible. Their hind feet can kind of reach over their heads. What, really? Yeah, they're some of the most flexible animals I've ever seen.
And that's because all aquatic mammals tend to have really, with fur, should I say semi-aquatic mammals, tend to have really dense under fur because it's strange to think of, but a platypus can spend 20 odd hours underwater without getting wet. So their fur is so dense. in a healthy platypus, that under fur will keep them dry.
And unfortunately for them, that became a major target of the fur industry. They are the animals with, in the 19th century at least, with the most valuable fur of any Australian mammal.
This is an odd question, but do they make noises? I don't think I've ever heard or seen in a video or certainly not live a platypus make any noises, but do they make any noises?
The young ones have been described as growling in their nests, which I find quite adorable. You've not heard this yourself? I've not heard this myself, but people who have excavated them have just described this kind of little puppy-like growl, which is quite adorable.
You mentioned there that they burrow. How do they make these burrows and where do they do that?
So again, I think they burrow better than any other burrowing animal I can think of. If you ever watch most burrowing animals, what they're doing is kicking out soil behind them. So they kind of excavate a bit and they'll push the soil backwards and then you'll see these big spoil heaps of soil outside their burrows. Which makes them easy to find. Exactly.
Plus, if you watch marmots, which are kind of like the European version of a wombat, and they just... just seeing showers of soil flying out the ground behind them. But what platypus do is they, at least where the soil's soft enough, is that they kind of just push the soil into the walls. So they make no spoil heaps, which means they're really hard to find. They're really strong.
If you look at a platypus skeleton, it's covered with these lumps and bumps that attach muscle for making really, really big spade-like hands when they're when they're in that configuration. So where do they put the spoil, though? Where do they put the soil? They just push it into the walls of the tunnel. What, they wiggle in? They wiggle in.
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Chapter 6: What adaptations allow the platypus to thrive in its environment?
how much chaos and confusion it caused in the scientific world and in the larger world in general, just by the very existence of an animal like the platypus, which suckles its young and yet lays eggs and seems to be, to a European's eyes, an amalgam of a whole bunch of other animals. You've got a picture in your book that comes from the second governor of New South Wales, John Hunter.
It's a picture of a platypus. Tell me the story of how he came to make that drawing and what became of that platypus.
Yeah, so Hunter was out on the Hawkesbury River near Sydney, and he was watching a Darug man hunting on the water. And he watched him spear this animal, which Hunter then went on to describe as an amphibious mammal, amphibious animal of the mole kind, which I love. I love that the earliest English name for platypuses was duck mole. 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.
So this poor woman was suddenly drenched and draped in alcohol and... pickled platypus and wombat remains.
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