London, UK – 10 September 2025

A new exhibition and academic paper are revisiting one of the greatest scientific puzzles of the Victorian era: the duck-billed platypus. The creature, with its bizarre combination of mammalian, avian, and reptilian features, baffled early naturalists and forced them to re-evaluate the very systems they used to classify life on Earth.

In the late 18th century, when the first platypus specimen arrived in Britain from Australia, it was met with intense skepticism. George Shaw, the curator at the British Museum, was so convinced it was a hoax—a duck’s bill sewn onto a beaver-like body—that he famously attacked it with scissors. This initial disbelief perfectly encapsulated the challenge the platypus presented to the rigid, hierarchical classification system established by Carl Linnaeus.

A Patchwork of Puzzles

The platypus’s unique blend of characteristics defied a simple taxonomic label.

 * Mammalian Features: It has fur, produces milk for its young, and has a warm-blooded metabolism.

 * Reptilian Features: It lays eggs and the males have venomous spurs on their hind legs, a trait commonly associated with snakes and other reptiles.

 * Avian Features: Its most distinctive feature, the leathery, duck-like bill, along with its webbed feet, seemed to link it to birds.

These conflicting traits led to a century of intense debate. Was the platypus a mammal, a reptile, or a new class of its own? The ongoing quarrel reflected a broader tension in the scientific community, as new discoveries from colonized territories, particularly Australia, continued to challenge the prevailing understanding of the natural world.

Redefining a Species

The mystery was finally solved when researchers discovered that the platypus, along with the echidna, belonged to a unique group of mammals called monotremes. The term “monotreme,” derived from the Greek for “single hole,” refers to the fact that these animals have a single external opening for reproduction, urination, and defecation, a characteristic found in birds and reptiles.

The eventual classification of the platypus into its own order, Monotremata, was a pivotal moment in the history of science. It demonstrated that nature did not always fit neatly into pre-defined categories and forced scientists to accept the existence of an animal that, by all accounts, should not have existed according to their rules.  The platypus, once considered a hoax, is now celebrated as one of the world’s most evolutionarily distinct and scientifically important mammals. Its existence, and the long struggle to classify it, stands as a testament to the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of scientific discovery.