P is for Platypus

If ever there was an animal that seemed designed to confound, perplex, and upset colonial science, it was the humble platypus (Ornithoryhnchus anatinus). Often described as “paradoxical,” the duck-billed, web-footed, beaver-tailed mammals seemed to invert the order of Nature, combining the features of so many animals that it boggled the imagination. Contemplating the platypus led a young Charles Darwin to muse in 1836, “A Disbeliever in everything beyond his own reason, might exclaim, ‘Surely two distinct Creators must be at work.’” The obsession of British scientists over the delicate matter of the platypus’s reproduction – and in particular, the question of whether or not it laid eggs and nursed its young – illustrated some of the profound tensions that lay at the heart of imperial science, e.g., the relative authority of amateurs and professionals, the cabinet and field, and indigenous people and colonial laymen.