Post by Zadkiel on Apr 14, 2016 11:06:30 GMT
This animal was certainly once a cryptid; belong to a realm where we today find the likes of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, both of which are massively unlikely to exist; and thought to be the stuff of fringe theory and pseudoscience.
Never has a real animal more completely looked like the work of a hoaxer and not a particularly imaginative hoaxer at that, since the platypus is a venomous, egg-laying mammal with the bill of a duck, the feet of an otter and the tail of a beaver. If you were a European naturalist in the 18th or 19th Century, wouldn't the sane reaction to receiving the corpse of such a creature from its supposed home in Australia be to say that it was a practical joke? While describing a carcass of the creature for the journal Nature's Miscellany in 1799, the well-respected British zoologist George Shaw began and ended his description with the acknowledgment that this might just be a crazy hoax.
Shaw was, it seems, basically convinced that the platypus was real, but he also was obviously trying to cover himself in case it turned out he had been hoodwinked, since Chinese sailors had earlier perpetrated a similar hoax with a supposed mermaid. It wouldn't be until nearly a century after Shaw's time that the platypus's existence was definitively confirmed and it endures as the ultimate proof that nothing is too ridiculous to be real.
Never has a real animal more completely looked like the work of a hoaxer and not a particularly imaginative hoaxer at that, since the platypus is a venomous, egg-laying mammal with the bill of a duck, the feet of an otter and the tail of a beaver. If you were a European naturalist in the 18th or 19th Century, wouldn't the sane reaction to receiving the corpse of such a creature from its supposed home in Australia be to say that it was a practical joke? While describing a carcass of the creature for the journal Nature's Miscellany in 1799, the well-respected British zoologist George Shaw began and ended his description with the acknowledgment that this might just be a crazy hoax.
Shaw was, it seems, basically convinced that the platypus was real, but he also was obviously trying to cover himself in case it turned out he had been hoodwinked, since Chinese sailors had earlier perpetrated a similar hoax with a supposed mermaid. It wouldn't be until nearly a century after Shaw's time that the platypus's existence was definitively confirmed and it endures as the ultimate proof that nothing is too ridiculous to be real.
