Imagine stumbling upon a creature that looks like a mash-up of a duck, a beaver, and an otter—with a dash of poison thrown in ...

The platypus doesn’t fit into any particular category: it’s a mammal, but it lays eggs like a reptile. It has a duck-like ...

The platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) has a puzzling array of features. Not only does it have that iconic duck bill, it lays eggs like a bird or reptile but feeds milk to its young like a mammal.

The duck-billed platypus is so absurd the British naturalist ... their young from patches of skin on their bellies. Males have venom-producing spurs on their hind legs that they use to fight ...

No, it does not, and here's why: It turns out that venomous snakes and the platypus have different duplications of the b-defensin genes. So, while co-opting these genes seems to be a common ...

The diagram illustrates separate gene duplications in different parts of the phylogeny for platypus venom defensin-like peptides (vDLPs), for lizard venom crotamine-like peptides (vCLPs), and for ...