#MarchofTheMammals the adorable Short-Beaked Echidna (Tachyglossus Aculeatus)!

#SciArt #MammalMarch #AnimalMarch #Echidna #ShortBeakedEchidna #Monotremes #WildAustralia #Rewilding #Endangered #Mammals #Animals #Wildlife #AnimalArt #ArtYear #ArtShare #BskyArt #Art

#MarchofTheMammals Is it a beaver or duck?! The Australian Platypus (Ornithorhynchus Anatinus) belong to a family of egg-laying mammals known as the monotremes

#SciArt #MammalMarch #AnimalMarch #Platypus #Monotremes #Australia #Mammals #Animals #Wildlife #AnimalArt #ArtYear #ArtShare #BskyArt #Art

Wild echidna looking straight at camera with his cute lil face

wild echidna showing off his strong front claws that are used for digging

Each echidna spine each has their own individual muscles, allowing them to be moved independently. Photo showing close up of spine pattern

Echidnas are egg laying #mammals ( #monotremes) with feet so strong that a captive #echidna once moved a refrigerator around a room. Fascinatingly, they have muscles at the base of each spine, allowing them to move individual spines independently.

#Australia #Photography #nature #nikon #naturePhoto

Puggle trouble prompts warning to watch out for baby echidnas With female echidnas seemingly creating burrows in random places at this time of the year, wildlife carers warn to keep an eye out for what might be disturbed while doing holiday work on your property...

www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01... #echidnas #monotremes

New fun fact! This one blew my mind. Imagine having no tummy. Wild, patrons! #BryansFaces #Patrons #Monotremes #Echidna #Platypus #AnimalFact

Platypus swimming near the surface of the water next to rocks.

Thrilled to see this big fat #platypus (check out that tail) foraging in #Hobart Rivulet. Wildlife in cities is a wonderful thing - we need to make all cities more #wildlife friendly (as well as protecting large areas of intact #native bush). Yay for #monotremes! #naturewriting #australianwildlife

#Habitat quality and water availability affect #genetic connectivity of #platypus across an #urban landscape - #OpenAccess zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #dispersal #monotremes #conservationgenetics @wileyecology.bsky.social

Episode 458: The Tasmanian Tiger and Friends https://media.blubrry.com/strangeanimalspodcast/content.blubrry.com/strangeanimalspodcast/Episode_458_marsupials.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:30 — 11.8MB) Subscribe: RSS | More Thanks to Viki, Erin, Weller, and Stella for their suggestions this week! **Further reading:** Tasmanian tiger pups found to be extraordinary similar to wolf pups The thylacine could open its jaws really wide: A sugar glider, gliding [photo from this page]: A happy quokka and a happy person: A swimming platypus: **Show transcript:** Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about some marsupial mammals suggested by Erin, Weller, and Stella, and a bonus non-marsupial from Australia suggested by Viki. Marsupials are mammals that give birth to babies that aren’t fully formed yet, and the babies then finish developing in the mother’s pouch. Not all female marsupials actually have a pouch, although most do. Marsupials are extremely common in Australia, but they’re also found in most other places around the world. Let’s start with Weller’s suggestion, the Tasmanian tiger. We’ve talked about it before, but not recently. We talked about it in our very first episode, in fact! Despite its name, it isn’t related to the tiger at all. Tigers are placental mammals, and the Tasmanian tiger is a marsupial. It’s also called the thylacine to make things less confusing. The thylacine was declared extinct after the last known individual died in captivity in 1936, but sightings have continued ever since. It’s not likely that a population is still around these days, but the thylacine is such a great animal that people hold out hope that it has survived and will one day be rediscovered. It got the name Tasmanian tiger because when European colonizers arrived in Tasmania, they saw a striped animal the size of a big dog, about two feet high at the shoulder, or 61 cm, and over six feet long if you included the long tail, or 1.8 meters. It was yellowish-brown with black stripes on the back half of its body and down its tail, with a doglike head and rounded ears. The thylacine was a nocturnal marsupial native to mainland Australia and the Australian island of Tasmania, but around 4,000 years ago, climate change caused more and longer droughts in eastern Australia and the thylacine population there went extinct. By 3,000 years ago, all the mainland thylacines had gone extinct, leaving just the Tasmanian population. The Tasmanian thylacines underwent a population crash around the same time that the mainland Australia populations went extinct—but the Tasmanian population had recovered and was actually increasing when Europeans showed up and started shooting them. The thylacine mostly ate small animals like ducks, water rats, and bandicoots. Its skull was very similar in shape to the wolf, which it wasn’t related to at all, but its muzzle was longer and its jaws were comparatively much weaker. Its jaws could open incredibly wide, which usually indicates an animal that attacks prey much larger than it is, but studies of the thylacine’s jaws and teeth show that they weren’t strong enough for the stresses of attacking large animals. Next, Stella wanted to learn about the sugar glider, and I was surprised that we haven’t talked about it before. It’s a nocturnal marsupial native to the forests of New Guinea and parts of Australia, with various subspecies kept as exotic pets in some parts of the world. It’s called a glider because of the animal’s ability to glide. It has a flap of skin between its front and back legs, called a patagium, and when it stretches its legs out, the patagia tighten and act as a parachute. This is similar to other gliding animals, like the flying squirrel. The sugar glider resembles a rodent, but it isn’t. It’s actually a type of possum. It lives in trees and has a partially prehensile tail that helps it climb around more easily, and of course it can glide from tree to tree. It’s an omnivore that eats insects, spiders, and other small animals, along with plant material, mainly sap. It will gnaw little holes in a tree to get at the sap or gum that oozes out. It will also eat fruit, nectar, pollen, and seeds, but most of the time it prefers to hang around flowers and wait for insects to approach. Then it grabs and eats the insect without having to chase it. The sugar glider is gray with black and white markings, big eyes that allow it to see well in darkness, rounded ears, and a really long, thick, furry tail. It’s a social animal that lives in family groups in small territories. Both males and females help take care of the joeys when they’re out of the mother’s pouch, mainly by helping them stay warm when it’s cold. Our last marsupial of this episode is Erin’s suggestion, the quokka. It’s about the size of a domestic cat, related to wallabies and kangaroos. It’s shaped roughly like a chonky little wallaby but with a smaller tail and with rounded ears, and it’s grey-brown in color. The quokka is considered incredibly cute because of the way its muzzle and mouth are shaped, which makes it look like it’s smiling. If you take a picture of a quokka’s face, it looks like it has a happy smile and that, of course, makes the people who look at it happy too. This has caused some problems, unfortunately. People who want to take selfies with a quokka sometimes forget that they’re wild animals. While quokkas aren’t very aggressive and are curious animals who aren’t usually afraid of people, they can and will bite when frightened. Touching a quokka or giving it food or drink is strictly prohibited, since it’s a protected animal. The quokka is most active at night. It sleeps during most of the day, usually hidden in a type of prickly plant that helps keep predators from bothering it. It gets most of its water needs from the plants it eats, and while it mostly hops around like a teensy kangaroo, it can also climb trees. Let’s finish with our non-marsupial animal. Viki wanted to learn about the platypus, which we haven’t really talked about since way back in episode 45. It’s native to Australia and is very weird-looking, so it’s easy to think it’s another marsupial, but the platypus is even weirder than that. It’s not a marsupial and it’s not a placental mammal. Instead, it’s an extremely rare third type of mammal called a monotreme. There are only two kinds of monotremes alive today, the echidna and the platypus. Monotremes retain a lot of traits that are considered primitive in mammals. Instead of giving birth to live babies, a monotreme mother lays eggs. The eggs have soft, leathery shells, but when they hatch, the babies look like marsupial newborns. The platypus is sometimes called the duck-billed platypus, because its snout does kind of look like a duck’s bill, but instead of being hard, the snout is soft and rubbery, and it’s packed with electroreceptors that allow the platypus to sense the tiny electrical fields generated by muscle contractions in its prey. I bet that was not what you expected from what looks like a small beaver with a duck bill! The platypus grows not quite two feet long, or 50 cm, and has short, dense, brown fur. It spends a lot of its time in the water, and has a flattened tail that acts as a rudder when it swims, along with its hind feet. It propels itself through the water with its front feet, which are large and have webbed toes. It lives in eastern Australia along rivers and streams, and digs a short burrow in the riverbank to sleep in. The female digs a deeper burrow before she lays her eggs, and she makes them a nest out of leaves. Baby platypuses are called puggles, and while the mother doesn’t have a pouch, she keeps her babies warm by tucking them against her tummy with her tail. Monotremes don’t have teats, but they do produce milk from what are called milk patches. The puggles lick the milk up. Until scientists figured out that monotremes have these milk patches, in 1824, they thought monotremes weren’t mammals at all but something more closely related to reptiles. Monotremes were much more common throughout the world until about 60 to 70 million years ago, when marsupials started outcompeting them. Marsupials don’t spend much time in water, though, because if they did their joeys would drown. The platypus and echidna both survived to the present day because they’re adapted for the water. The platypus mainly navigates in the water using its electrolocation abilities, and eats worms, fish, insects, crustaceans, and anything else it can catch. It’s easy to think, “Oh, that mammal is so primitive, it must not have evolved much since the common ancestor of mammals, birds, and reptiles was alive 315 million years ago,” but of course that’s not the case. It’s just that the monotremes that survived did just fine with the basic structures they evolved a long time ago, and they’re still going strong today. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at _strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com_. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

just listened to a new episode by @KateShaw , about the sugar glider, the quokka, the thylacine, and the platypus

strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net/2025/11/10/episode-458-t...

#marsupials
#monotremes
#quokka
#thylacine
#sugarGlider

#trailcam #trailcams short-beaked echidna (tachyglossus aculeatus) #mammals #monotremes #echidnas

#trailcam #trailcams short-beaked echidna (tachyglossus aculeatus) #mammals #monotremes #echidnas

It's spring and Echidnas – ant & termite eating, egg-laying mammals (monotremes) found throughout Australia – are emerging from deep winter hibernation. Saw this one crossing the road. Their array of sharp quills protect them from predators. #WildOz #monotremes #AustralianWildlife

Quintessentially Australian - the #echidna and the #platypus, two egg laying #monotremes.

Looking closely, it seems the echidna’s back legs are depicted the wrong way round, facing forwards rather then backwards 🤔
#wildoz #biodiversity #ausmammals

Platypus are very hard to spot and harder to video. They surface for a few seconds and dive and may reappear some distance away minutes later. caught this with telephoto a few days ago at Gillamatong Ck, Braidwood, NSW.

Fascinating animals: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus
#WildOz #monotremes

A couple of well fed Aussie critters. First an echidna, one of Australia's unique egg laying mammals (monotremes). Second a Swamp Wallaby. Wallabies are smaller than kangaroos but have more muscular fore limbs as they are good rock scramblers. #australia #wildlife #monotremes #marsupials

a frame from mr dog ‘toon from the guardian (very personable yet simple line drawings of animals in colour)…shows a lab taking survey questions from a platypus and says how incredible they are at smelling so no longer need to take surveys but can sniff out a platypus in its den as they can detect a teaspoon of sugar in 4 million litres of water…amazing

feel-good stuff from @firstdogonthemoon.bsky.social

#paddlepups #monotremes #dogsarethebestpeople
#usingdogsforgoodnotevil #science

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Look at this little #puggle (baby #platypus)! Just look at him! A #mammal that lays eggs, has a duck bill, webbed feet & venomous spurs hind legs.

I swear, when the universe created the platypus, it was drunk. #monotremes #animals #nature

Episode 439: The Missing Echidna https://media.blubrry.com/strangeanimalspodcast/content.blubrry.com/strangeanimalspodcast/echidna.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:43 — 10.8MB) Subscribe: RSS | More Thanks to Cara for suggesting we talk about the long-beaked echidna this week! **Further reading:** Found at last: bizarre, egg-laying mammal finally rediscovered after 60 years A short-beaked echidna: The rediscovered Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna: **Show transcript:** Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we’re going to learn about an animal suggested by Cara, the echidna, also called the spiny anteater. It’s a type of mammal, but it’s very different from almost all the mammals alive today. We talked about the echidna briefly in episode 45, but this week we’re going to learn more about it, especially one that was thought to be extinct but was recently rediscovered. Cara specifically suggested we learn about the long-beaked echidna, which lives only in New Guinea. The short-beaked echidna lives in New Guinea and Australia. The names short and long beaked make it sound like the echidna is a bird, but the beak is actually just a snout. It just looks beak-like from a distance and is covered with tough skin, sort of like the platypus’s snout is sometimes called a duck-bill. In June and July of 2023, an expedition made up of scientists and local experts from various parts of Indonesia, as well as from the University of Oxford in England, discovered and rediscovered a lot of small animals in the Cyclops Mountains. They even discovered an entire cave system that no one but some local people had known about, and they discovered it when one of the expedition members stepped on a mossy spot in the forest and fell straight through down into the cave. But one animal they were really hoping to see hadn’t made an appearance and they worried it was actually extinct. That one was Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, a type of mammal known as a monotreme. There are three big groups of mammals. The biggest is the placental mammal group, which includes humans, dogs, cats, mice, bats, horses, whales, giraffes, and so on. A female placental mammal grows her babies inside her body in the uterus, each baby wrapped in a fluid-filled sac called a placenta. Placental mammals are pretty well developed when they’re born. The second type is the marsupial mammal group, which includes possums, kangaroos, koalas, wombats, sugar gliders, and so on. A female marsupial has two uteruses, and while her babies initially grow inside her, they’re born very early. A baby marsupial, called a joey, is just a little pink squidge about the size of a bean that’s not anywhere near done growing, but it’s not completely helpless. It has relatively well developed front legs so it can crawl up its mother’s fur and find a teat. Some species of marsupial have a pouch around its teats, like possums and kangaroos, but other species don’t. Once the baby finds a teat, it clamps on and stays there for weeks or months while it continues to grow. The third and rarest type of mammal these days is the monotreme group, and monotremes lay eggs. But their eggs aren’t like bird eggs, they’re more like reptile eggs, with a soft, leathery shell. The female monotreme keeps her eggs inside her body until it’s almost time for them to hatch. The babies are small squidge beans like marsupial newborns, and I’m delighted to report that they’re called puggles. There are only two monotremes left alive in the world today, the platypus and the echidna. The echidna has a pouch and after a mother echidna lays her single egg, she tucks it in the pouch. Monotremes show a number of physical traits that are considered primitive. Some of the traits, like the bones that make up their shoulders and the placement of their legs, are shared with reptiles but not found in most modern mammals. Other traits are shared with birds. The word monotreme means “one opening,” and that opening, called a cloaca, is used for reproductive and excretory systems instead of those systems using separate openings. It wasn’t until 1824 that scientists figured out that monotreme moms produce milk. They don’t have teats, so the puggles lick the milk up from what are known as milk patches. Before then a lot of scientists argued that monotremes weren’t mammals at all and should either be classified with the reptiles or as their own class, the prototheria. It’s easy to think, “Oh, that mammal is so primitive, it must not have evolved much since the common ancestor of mammals, birds, and reptiles was alive 315 million years ago,” but of course that’s not the case. It’s just that the monotremes that survived did just fine with the basic structures they evolved a long time ago. There were no evolutionary pressures to develop different shoulder bones or stop laying eggs. Other structures have evolved considerably. Monotremes aren’t closely related to any of the other mammals alive today, either marsupial or placental mammals. The last shared ancestor lived at least 163 million years ago and possibly much earlier, maybe even 220 million years ago. The first dinosaurs lived around 230 million years ago, so we are talking a very long time ago. The echidna is relatively closely related to the platypus and its ancestors probably looked and acted a lot like a platypus, including being largely aquatic. The echidna is adapted to life on land, even though it can swim quite well. It looks superficially like a big hedgehog since it’s covered in spines as well as hair, and if it feels threatened it will curl up into a ball like a hedgehog with its spines sticking out. It’s also a strong digger and will often dig a shallow hole very quickly when threatened, so that a potential predator encounters basically a bunch of spines sticking up out of the dirt. But unlike a hedgehog, which is usually small enough to fit in an adult human’s hand, the echidna can grow over 20 inches long, or 52 cm, and a big male can weigh as much as 13 lbs, or 6 kg. The echidna has a long, skinny snout with a pair of nostrils at the end. The snout is bare of fur and the echidna pokes it into the ground and leaf litter to find the worms and other small invertebrates it eats. Not only does it have a good sense of smell to locate food, its snout also contains electroreceptors that allow it to sense the tiny muscle movements of its prey. The short-beaked echidna mostly eats termites and ants, while the long-beaked echidna mostly eats earthworms. The echidna doesn’t have teeth and its mouth is tiny, but it has a long sticky tongue to lick up the animals it eats. The long-beaked echidna’s tongue has tiny spines on it, sort of like a cat’s tongue has tiny spines that help it groom its fur, but the spines on the echidna’s tongue help it stab worms and insect larvae and drag them into its mouth. Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna is a subspecies that was only discovered by scientists in 1961. It’s only known from a single specimen, and it hadn’t been seen since. In 2007 a scientific expedition found signs that an echidna was still living in the Cyclops Mountains, namely nose-pokes in the dirt where an echidna had been looking for food, but despite lots of searching for the animal, no one had seen it. Since the echidna is nocturnal and spends most of the day sleeping in its burrow, it’s hard to spot even under the best conditions. The 2023 expedition used over 80 trail cameras to try and find the echidna. The trail cams were set up for four weeks and not a single one recorded a single echidna—until the very last day, and even then it was almost the very last video on the memory card. It’s just a short little video of an echidna just walking along on its way to do echidna stuff, but it made a big difference for the scientists. Now that we know that Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna isn’t extinct, scientists can work with local people to help protect it and its habitat. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at _strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com_. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us for as little as one dollar a month and get monthly bonus episodes. Thanks for listening!

now listening to @KateShaw talk about mysterious animals that leave snout-pokes with electricity-sensing snouts ... yes, that's right, echidnas!

strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net/2025/06/30/episode-439-t...

#mammals
#echidna
#monotremes

It's always exciting when a camera trap captures a platypus. When one's in the water a layer of air and water on its fur makes it too cold to trigger the sensors, but this one climbed right out of the water. #platypus #australiananimals #Tasmania #monotremes #nature #cameratrap #trailcam #wildlife

How scientists confirmed the existence of 200-million-year-old species thought to be extinct Biologists have confirmed the existence of a 200-million-year-old species of egg-laying mammal that has been assumed to be extinct.

#Biology #Zoology #Monotremes #LongBeakedEchidna

abcnews.go.com/US/scientist...

🦔 Short-beaked Echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus)
📏 30–45 cm
📍 Julatten, Queensland, Australia 🇦🇺
🗓 Sep 2019

#mammals #monotremes

Shot of partly submerged platypus, but showing its considerable length.

Closer-up showing the ‘evil’ eye and bill.

Bubbles over a black shadow as it dives

Daily ‘puss

#monotremes #platypus

A 108-Million-Year-Old Bone Just Rewrote Our Understanding of the World’s Strangest Mammal New fossil evidence suggests echidnas evolved from a water-dwelling ancestor, not a land-based one. The bone structure closely resembles that of semi-aquatic animals like the platypus. A tiny fossiliz...

A cool bit of #paleontology and #evolution news today: scitechdaily.com/a-108-millio... #monotremes #mammals #echidna #platypus #Australia #wildlife #fossils 🌿

A 108-Million-Year-Old Bone Just Rewrote Our Understanding of the World’s Strangest Mammal New fossil evidence suggests echidnas evolved from a water-dwelling ancestor, not a land-based one. The bone structure closely resembles that of semi-aquatic animals like the platypus. A tiny fossiliz...

New fossil evidence suggests #Echidnas evolved from a water-dwelling ancestor, not a land-based one. The bone structure closely resembles that of semi-aquatic animals like the #Platypus.

#Monotremes #Wildlife #Australia

scitechdaily.com/a-108-millio...

The surprising evolution of the weirdest animals on Earth, according to a new study | CNN A new study suggests the platypus and echidna — the only egg-laying mammals — had a water-dwelling ancestor. The finding could upend what’s known of their evolution.

A 100Myo fossil from Dinosaur Cove suggests that echidnas and platypuses share a semiaquatic ancestor, a challenge to beliefs that echidnas evolved solely on land. This discovery reshapes our understanding of monotreme evolution

-Paper in comment-

#Monotremes
#Evolution
#Paleontology
#Australia
🧪⚒️

wombat at the entrance to its burrow

platypus cruising

head of a brown snake

blue-tongued lizard

in fact both #monotremes, wombats, wallabies in the forest, lots of birds and #reptiles.
No Tas devils, of course, or koalas in this particular part of the world (though not far away).
I’ve yet to visit Canada, sadly, but it looks wonderful.

Platypuses glow under ultraviolet light, and biologists have no idea why. This is in addition to being duck-billed, web-footed, beaver-tailed mammals that lay eggs, have venom glands and elecro-reception. At this point I think they're just dropping hints that they're probably from another planet.

Useless Facts, Badly Drawn #160: Platypuses glow in UV light and we don't know why 🤔
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#platypus #monotremes #australia #wtf #butwhytho #glowinthedark #strangebuttrue #trivia #didyouknow #animals #bizarre #nature #biology #webcomic #comic #animals #funfacts #facts #uselessfactsbadlydrawn

🦘 Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus)
📏 38–60 cm
📍 Yungaburra, Queensland, Australia 🇦🇺
🗓 Sep 2019

#animals #mammals #monotremes

Amazing experience today, got to both of Australia’s #Monotremes on the same day in #Tasmania!
#Platypus #Echinda

I need more people to know how fucked up #monotremes are. These fake ass mammals out here laying EGGs.