“The cask containing the two specimens … reached Newcastle late in 1799, transported from quayside to the Society’s rooms by a woman servant. She carried it on her head and, by mischance, the bottom of the cask gave way, dousing her with pungent spirits. But her dismay was reportedly the greater when, looking down, she saw not only the small chunky wombat, but the remains of ‘a strange creature, half bird, half beast, lying at her feet’.”
Thomas Bewick was to write that the creature “seems to be an animal sui generis; it appears to possess a three-fold nature, that of a fish, a bird and a quadruped, and is related to nothing that we have hitherto seen.” It was about the size of a “small cat,” with a bill “very similar to that of a duck,” with four short legs, “the forelegs … shorter than those of the hind and their webs spread considerably beyond the claws.” Bewick concluded “it resisted any attempt to arrange it in any of the useful modes of classification.”
Dr. George Shaw, a Fellow of the Royal Society and Assistant Keeper of Natural History at the British Museum, also obtained a dried specimen in 1799. He wondered if it was a hoax, an animal stitched together by clever Chinese or Japanese taxidermists to deceive credulous sailors. He wrote: “I almost doubted the testimony of my own eyes.” But he could not find any deception.
A specimen found its way into the hands of Professor Johann Blumenbach, a comparative anatomist of the University of Göttingen in Germany, who christened the creature Ornithorynchus paradoxous. “In every way a paradox,” the Australian arrival raised a host of questions. Was it, as its brown fur suggested, a mammal? But where were its mammary glands? Where were its nipples? And how could a young animal suckle with that duckbill? Or was it a reptile, among which amphibians were then grouped, for this beast was surely aquatic? Or perhaps it was avian; its duck-like bill indicated an affinity with warm-blooded birds. Blumenbach was stumped. Ornithorynchus did not fall into any of the major classes of vertebrates—the mammals, fish, birds, and reptiles.
Other specimens were forwarded to the distinguished British anatomist Everard Home at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The mystery deepened, for Home made a series of wonderful discoveries published in papers written from 1800–1802. The “duck-bill” beak was an exploratory organ for touching and tasting the muddy bottom of rivers as the animal searched for its food, small crustaceans and insects underwater. The beak was not hard like that of a bird; rather it was moist, soft, and highly flexible. And the reproductive organs were a surprise!
Figure 1: The female reproductive systems of six vertebrates. All dissections are depicted as if the animal were lying on its back facing the reader. All of the systems are bilaterally symmetrical except for the bird where only the left side is functional; the right side degenerates during development. The term cloaca is used for a chamber that receives the contents of the digestive, urinary, and reproductive tracts. The term urogenital sinus is a chamber that receives products from the urinary and reproductive tracts; the digestive tract empties separately via its own final chamber, the rectum (not shown). (Redrawn by Jim Stamos, based on various sources).
Originally published at http://www.sciencecases.org/antipodal_mystery/antipodal_mystery2.asp
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