When the first skin of a duck-billed platypus arrived in England in 1799, the keeper of natural history at the British Museum thought it must be an elaborate hoax; how else to explain an animal with the fur of a mammal and the beak of a bird?
But European naturalists were soon to realise that the hairy, egg-laying creature from Australia, which suckles its young and hunts "blind" with its eyes, ears and nostrils all closed while swimming underwater, was very real. Zoologists studying the creature's anatomy and behaviour confirmed that the duck-billed platypus was one of the strangest anomalies in the animal kingdom, and now geneticists have confirmed just how weird it is, with the first complete analysis of its fully decoded genome.
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Scientists said this week that they have now deciphered the entire DNA of the duck-billed platypus in a study involving more than 100 scientists from eight countries. They found that the animal's genes are indeed an unusual amalgam derived from the disparate worlds of reptiles, birds and mammals.
The duck-billed platypus is one of just a few living species of mammals that lays eggs rather than giving birth to live young - the echidnas are the other mammals that lay eggs. It is a member of the monotreme group of mammals, which refers to the "single hole" that serves as both anus and urino-genital opening.
Scientists were keen to explore its DNA because the platypus represents one of the few living species of mammals forming the monotremes, which split off from the rest of the mammals about 166 million years ago.
"It's probably the most eagerly awaited genome since the chimp genome because platypuses are so weird," said Professor Jenny Graves of the Australian National University in Canberra, one of the co-authors of the study published in the journal Nature.
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