Scott Snider, age 11, of St. Catharines, Ontario Canada for his question:
What is the platypus like?
His furry, barrel shaped body resembles a large mole. He has a beaver type tail and huge webbed feet, used for swimming and digging muddy burrows beside his favorite stream. Instead of a snout, he has what looks like a duck's bill. The female lays eggs and feeds her babies on mother's milk. The duckbill platypus seems to be assembled from parts of several different animals, but altogether he is not like any other animal in the world.
Early European visitors to Australia and Tasmania met the kangaroo and the wallaby and were amazed. Little did they dream that the even more amazing platypus also was there. Nobody noticed him until 1796, which was almost 200 years later. We cannot blame anyone for this over¬sight, for the strange animal lives a very secretive life in out of the¬way places.
His favorite haunts are isolated streams and he spends the day curled up like a kitten, deep in his muddy burrow beside a stream. He comes out at night, dives in and hunts for crayfish, worms and other smallish creatures that live near the bottom. The early Australian settlers called him a water mole, a duck mole or a duckbill. But they did not know what to make of him. Neither did the scientists who first tried to classify him. To them he was a puzzling, impossible paradox. So they named him the paradoxus. Later he was renamed the duckbill platypus and classified in an exclusive group of his own.
His famous duckbill is a snout made of leathery material just fine for sifting food from the muddy floor of a stream. From his bill to his six inch beaver type tail measures about two feet. His total weight is a little more than four pounds. His thick, silky fur is sprinkled with long glossy guard hairs to shed the water. His back and sides may be rich sepia brown or almost black. His underside is silvery grey, tinged with yellow or pink.
The female platypus is slightly smaller and her underside has a more reddish tinge. The male and female meet only for a short mating season, sometime between August and November. Then the female departs to seclude herself alone in a secret burrow, which may be 60 feet long. There she lays her two round soft shelled eggs and nestles them for a week or so, until they hatch.
The helpless babes, no bigger than half an inch, are naked and helpless and their eyes do not open until they are eleven weeks old. For four months they stay in the next, fed on mother's milk. By this time they are old enough to explore the water. They will be adults in two and a half years and can expect to live about ten years.
We tend to think that the platypus's most remarkable feature is his duckbill. Scientists agree that this indeed is remarkable. But to them there is something else. The duckbill platypus is one of a very few animals that lay eggs and feed their babes on mother's milk. In other words, the female platypus is an egg laying mammal.