Encore: The misfit mammal that defies biological conventions
5/7/202651 min
It was love at first sight, when Jack Ashby first set eyes upon a platypus specimen as a young university student.
The introduction set him on a lifelong mission to meet these quintessentially Australian creatures in the wild, and redefine their reputation as "weird" or "primitive".
He's met many other animals along the way, coming face to face with an elusive snow leopard family in the Himalayas, with wombats and echidnas, and seeing only the eyes of a sloth bear, reflecting his torchlight in a pitch black forest.
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First 90 secondsRichard Fidler· Host0:00
ABC Listen: podcasts, radio, news, music, and more Jack Ashby is a British zoologist from Cambridge University's Zoological Museum, who writes very candidly, "If I sound excited about platypuses, it's because I am." Jack Ashby is fascinated by the utterly distinctive creatures that have evolved on our island continent, but nothing delights him as much as platypuses. And it is platypuses, by the way, not platypi, because it's a Greek word and not a Latin one. The British, when they first came to Australia, were confounded by the platypus, a creature that has a body like a mole, a bill like a duck, and feet like an otter, that lays eggs and yet suckles its young. Well, all that just threw out all their systems of animal classification out of whack. And the way they and the rest of the world dealt with their confusion was to all too often disparage Australia's wildlife as weird or even primitive. Australia was seen by them as a place with joke animals and, alarmingly, no pre-existing humans. Well, Jack Ashby doesn't think this is a very grown-up way to look at things. He sees platypuses and echidnas and Tasmanian devils and all our other creatures as noble, beautiful, and fascinating, and he wants the world to know all about them. Jack's book is called Platypus