Furthermore, platypuses have UV-sensitive vision, so they can see and interact with each other at night. This is important because platypuses, and biofluorescent flying squirrels and opossums, are all active during the dim hours of dawn, dusk, and night. The proposed function of the trait was to help them see other platypuses in low-light environments. The researchers assumed that the fluorescence observed is not a property of museum specimens due to preservation techniques, a possibility that was not ruled out. This is similar to how fluorescent lights work they absorb one wavelength and emit a different wavelength. It then gives off visible light between 500 and 600 nanometers (green or cyan to us) an optical process called fluorescence. When ultraviolet (UV) light shines on the platypus pelt (which is brown in visible light) it absorbs UV wavelengths between 200 and 400 nanometers. The tardigrade, a water-dwelling micro-creature that measures less than half a millimeter long. In short, “The platypus is nature’s crazy quilt, as this strange creature looks like about a half-dozen different animals all rolled into one.” Although long believed to be “an undeveloped or inefficient relative to placental mammals,” we now know it is “a superbly engineered creature … an elegant solution for mammalian life in streams-not a primitive relic of a bygone world.” įigure 2. Actually, it is a mosaic of a mammal that lays eggs, sports a duck-like bill and webbed feet, uses electroreception to find food, has a body and short legs like a Dachshund dog, and wields a venomous spur like a snake.
The platypus possesses unique features and genes not typical of mammals, or even reptiles and birds, but is classified as a mammal only because it has fur, and the females suckle their young after they hatch from the eggs the female lays. It is an “enigmatic mélange of reptilian (or birdlike), with obvious mammalian, characters,” said Stephen Jay Gould. Often called the world’s most puzzling animal, the platypus is one of the strangest creatures existing today. New Discovery: The Platypus Glows in the Dark!Īnd so do many other animals – another conundrum for Darwinism.
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