Platypus - Ornithorynchus anatinus

The platypus is an anim-algam (you're welcome) - a combination of as arbitrary and disparate a set of ideas as leg hair loss and the oil that forms in the butter when you leave it out on the bench for too long at room temperature. When specimens were first sent back to England during European settlement, people thought it was an exaggerated fabrication of Australian bits and pieces - many decades years later Australia realised that was a fantastic idea and sent Barry Humphries. With the bill of a duck, the body of an otter, the tail of a beaver (albeit plus fur, can't have it all sorry), and the webbed feet of any of the above, it was already a bit off-colour. Then they found out it laid eggs and didn't have nipples at which point everybody started losing their minds. The theory goes that God created cocaine, and then the platypus, and then decided he really needed to just slow the hell down.

Let's go through it one by one. The bill, first of all, is an amazingly dense collection of touch- and electro-receptive cells, with 40,000 electroreceptors (30 per square millimetre) and 46,500 mechanoreceptors (slightly more than 30 per square millimetre) covering the bill in total. Imagine the smallest person you know - these receptors are very small, even compared to them. But there are 40,000 of them. Imagine 40,000 versions of the smallest person you know. It's a horrible thought isn't it - short people are sort of confusing, you can't tell if they're trying to be funny or if they're just doing it unintentionally.

The second body part of note is their body and tail - conceptually removed from their bill and feet, this is basically a sock with eyes. Covering all of it is fur at a density of 600-900 hairs per square millimetre - so dense that air cannot escape. So in a sense, if you made a platypus into a balloon, and made sure it just had super tight sphincters, that joy-giver would never deflate. Their tail, adopted from the anatomy of everybody's favourite Canadian and not-the-only-recent-immigrant-that-the-British-aren't-unanimous-about, is the only storage point for subcutaneous fat in the platypus' body, holding about 40% of a platypus' body fat. I don't have a joke for that I just thought it was really interesting. I dissected an echidna at university once and it was like Browns Plains on a Thursday night in there, so to find out the echidna's closest relative, the platypus, has no subcutaneous fat is more surprising than drinking a mouthful of cider vinegar thinking it was apple juice (guilty!). To pull together what fat they do have, platypus spend almost every waking hour, regularly more than 12 hours a day, searching for food, which is why everybody regards them as a true Australian.

Finally the feet of the platypus come with their own surprise. Not only do platypus propel themselves with their front feet and steer with their hind feet - where the inverse is true for most aquatic mammals - males also have a spur on the back of their hind feet which can deliver a powerful venom. This means they're one of only two venomous mammals in the world. It also means they're messed up. But the fact that male platypus obviously get the coolest thing, and the fact that this design is considered to have persisted for so long through the fossil timeline, might be evidence against thinking of girls as being as cool as guys. If that isn't science, then I don't know what wants to be wrong. Wait - what?

So in conclusion, in the platypus, we have been blessed with the knowledge of what it would be like if Norwegian Recycling did this:

but to every animal on the face of the planet. Thank you everybody. God bless.