The story of two of the strangest animals on the planet just got a little stranger, thanks to clues revealed by a lone fossil specimen that scientists now say represents a long-extinct ancestor. The ...

If you’ve always thought echidnas and platypuses were distant cousins who went their separate ways on land and water, think again. A single fossilized arm bone, found in a remote corner of ...

Jars of tiny platypus and echidna specimens, collected in the late 1800s by the scientist William Caldwell, have been discovered in the stores of Cambridge's University Museum of Zoology. Jars of tiny ...

Waddling, wriggling, ambling, digging, laying eggs. There’s no shortage of verbiage when it comes to describing monotremata—the taxonomic order made up of only two animals, the platypus and the ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Echidnas may have evolved from a water-dwelling ancestor in an unusual evolutionary event, ...

As the world’s only surviving egg-laying mammals, Australasia’s platypus and four echidna species are among the most extraordinary animals on Earth. They are also very different from each other. The ...

Monotremes have left a poor fossil record, and paleontology has been virtually mute during two decades of discussion about molecular clock estimates of the timing of divergence between the platypus ...

New analysis of a 100-million-year-old fossil embedded in a rocky cove in Australia suggests echidnas may have evolved from swimming ancestors. That's basically unheard of: While there are many ...

The platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), sometimes called the duck-billed platypus is native to Eastern Australia and Tasmania. It is the sole-surviving member of its family (Ornithorhynchidae) and ...

The platypus is an odd duck of the animal world: an egg-laying, duck-billed, beaver-tailed mammal that baffled European naturalists when they first discovered it. One of its more puzzling features is ...