In May 1872, Adelaide’s doctors were surveyed about the “noxious effluvia” emanating from the River Torrens, the South Australian Advertiser reported. John Burn wrote to the paper to say he endorsed their condemnation of “the filthy state of Adelaide – a city of stenches”. “If any of our citizens be sceptical, I would suggest his […]
Tag: ornithorhynchus anatinus
Platypus milk: unlikely weapon in fight against superbugs
They are duck-billed, egg-laying, semi-aquatic mammals with poisonous spurs on their webbed feet: the Australian platypus is so weird that early European zoologists thought it must be an elaborate hoax. But now a team of Australian scientists have found something else unique to the strange little animals: their milk has a novel chemical structure that […]
Platypus | Ornithorhynchus anatinus
Early one morning during my Australian trip I headed out along the Condamine River to a quiet spot that I had noticed on a previous excursion. Here the river widened around a bend, forming a slow-flowing, lagoon-like stretch of water that had reeds and grasses along its edges. When I first saw this part of […]
The Million Dollar Question – How Many Platypuses?
It will be erroneous to presume that platypuses are abundant, in fact there is no current number to date that could confirm a realistic population number, but only the vast large estimates between 10 thousand to 100 thousand platypuses may be in existence. Counting platypus, or platypuses is a very difficult task, even trying to […]
Platypus or Platypuses please .. Not Platypi
I never forgot several years back the spontaneous remark of one of my web readers from Texas saying that “I talked about the platypus like if this animal was still alive” and if this was correct she had lived with this erroneous conception for over 20 years. Where others as I would show them this […]