Platypus Matters

The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals

Jack Ashby

Jack Ashby, the author of this delightful and informative mashup of memoir and science, is a zoologist at Cambridge University’s Museum of Zoology. He also spends a lot of time in the field, seeking out shy Australian mammals.

For all of his training and expertise, Ashby reacts to cute animals as anyone would: with an appropriate amount of squee. Take, for example, the western pygmy-possum. It’s tiny — only about 2 inches long with big round eyes, a small snout, enormous ears that it folds down over its face when it sleeps, and a long tail that spirals into a perfect coil. ‘It looks,’ Ashby says, ‘like it was designed by a cartoonist whose brief was to come up with the most adorable creature that their imaginations could muster.’ He goes on to write that when you wake a pygmy-possum, ‘it sits curled up in the cup of your palm, slowly rousing from your body heat. The heart melts.’

But it’s the platypus that first steals his heart. In his story about observing one for the first time in person, he admits to succumbing to a few tears. As there’s no officially accepted term for baby platypuses, he proposes they should be called platypups — and the term platypusology appears more than once.

He’s basically heart-eye emojis about Australian mammals, and it’s catching.

The first few chapters of the book are devoted to unpacking amazing facts about the platypus. This is the ideal book for anyone who, as a kid, was obsessed with the encyclopedia, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, or The Guinness Book of World Records.

Herewith, some of the many things you will learn about the platypus.

It has a bill that looks like a duck’s, but it’s leathery. A body like a mole, feet like an otter, cheek pouches like a hamster, and bony grinding pads in its mouth instead of teeth. It’s semi-aquatic — a platypus can dive up to 75 times an hour when its foraging for food underwater. They lay eggs, but also produce milk — although they don’t have nipples. Their fur fluoresces under UV light, but scientists don’t know why. And the males are venomous. Oh, also, their front feed are webbed. As Ashby puts it, ‘Platypus limbs are like Swiss Army knives, with gadgets for walking, swimming, and digging.’

On hearing this, most of us would say, ‘Whoa. Weird!’ and mean it as a compliment. But Ashby takes issue with describing Australian mammals this way. His argument is that if we other these animals by calling them weird, we make them seem lesser, and that places them in danger. Australia has the worst mammal extinction rate of any place on Earth. Ashby believes that minimizing the wonder of its animals goes hand-in-hand with discounting Aboriginal contributions to understanding them — and all of that can be traced back to Australia’s colonial history.

There are a few times when he shouts from his podium, but it’s hard to fault someone so earnest.

After you get to know the platypus, subsequent chapters turn to other Australian mammals: wombats, wallabies, dingos, quokkas, and a bunch of tiny marsupials that are fun to say: quolls, dibblers, dunnarts, bandicoots. And then there’s the echidna. It’s a mammal about the size of a basketball with spines like a porcupine and a pouch like a marsupial. Its front feet are shaped like spades for digging, and their hind feet point backwards. If you scare one a little, it rolls into a protective ball. If you scare it a lot, it flattens itself out, tummy down, then shimmies its whole body until it’s partially buried in the dirt, clinging to the earth with its sharp claws.

The final chapters address taxidermy, the role museums play in conservation, and how to decolonize natural history. Throughout, the text is peppered with quotes and illustrations from the journals of 19th-century naturalists. Much of it is quaint and enlightening. But some of those gentlemen were straight-up racists, and they killed a lot of animals to learn about them. Those bits are unpleasant to read.

Fair warming: There is also a lot of discussion of poo. It begins with wombats pooping out little cubes, which is somewhat cute, then gets into some descriptions that you would find hilarious if you were a nine-year-old boy. Proceed with caution and a sense of wonder.

We are just one species on the tree of life, as is the platypus. We humans may be relatively good at things like karaoke and reading books, but we are utterly lame at finding and catching worms buried in the sediment at the bottom of a lake with our eyes closed. We are the best at being humans, and platypuses are the best at being platypuses. — Jack Ashby

Strong Sense of Place is a listener-supported podcast. If you like the work we do, you can help make it happen by joining our Patreon! That'll unlock bonus content for you, too — including Mel's secret book reviews and Dave's behind-the-scenes notes for the latest Two Truths and a Lie.

no spoilers. ever.

We'll share enough detail to help you decide if a book is for you, but we'll never ruin plot twists or give away the ending.