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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Monotremes have left a poor fossil record, and paleontology has been virtually mute during two decades of discussion about molecular clock estimates of the timing of divergence between the platypus ...

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 ...

Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in ...

Monotremes, found only in Australia and New Guinea, are unique mammals that lay eggs, combining features of reptiles and mammals. This group includes the platypus and four echidna species. They ...

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 ...

New analysis of a 100-million-year-old fossil embedded in a rocky cove in Australia suggests echidnas may have evolved from swimming ancestors. That's basically unheard of: While there are many ...