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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Six monotremes living in the same place at the same time, 100 million years ago at Lightning Ridge, NSw. Clockwise from lower left: Opalios splendens, a newly described species dubbed an ‘echidnapus’; ...

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 ...

DNA analysis of the land-loving, spiny echidna has found it was once an amphibious platypus-like creature. The study by Australian evolutionary biologists shows the platypus and echidna diverged from ...

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 ...

A comparison of the genomes of the platypus and echidna — Australia’s egg-laying mammals — has revealed new clues about how these monotremes diverged from other mammals. A team that included ...

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, ...

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 such a strange animal that it was originally thought to be an elaborate hoax by pranksters When European ...

An artist’s impression depicts Kryoryctes at Dinosaur Cove in Australia. New research supports the hypothesis that Kryoryctes is a common ancestor of both the platypus and echidna. - Peter Schouten ...