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The Puzzling Platypus
Broadcast Sunday 22 July 2001
with Robyn Williams
Summary:
Author and historian Anne Moyal tells the extraordinary tale of how the humble platypus baffled the scientific world.
Transcript:
Robyn Williams: One of the most beautiful new books, to look at and to hold, is combined with one of the most intriguing tales of Australian science. It cuts through so much of the debate over the last 200 years, about zoology, including of Darwin, of Richard Owen and other figures trying to work out how all those strange creatures from the weird new land in Australia linked to all the others.
The book is about the platypus, the author is the historian Ann Moyal, and here she is with just a vignette about the strange tale of an extraordinary beast.
Ann Moyal: Australian icon, the figure on our 20-cent coin; how little we have known about the strange saga of the amazing platypus.
Yet from the moment the first preserved specimen reached England in 1799, it was greeted with astonishment and disbelief. Was this a Colonial hoax? With its webbed feet, the bill of a duck and the furred body of a mammal, the animal confounded all the prevailing views of classification and sparked intense debate among leading British and European comparative anatomists and biologists.
The controversy about this small Australian animal had large consequences for the gathering debate on evolution and for the systematic marshalling of the animal kingdom.
Ever since Aristotle had made the first scientific classification of animals in his ‘Historia Animallium’ in 334BC, drawing on creatures known in classical times in Greece and its islands, and from travellers’ tales, the reproductive organs of animals had become increasingly important among systematists in arranging them into related groups, classes and genera. In this hierarchy, mammals in general gave birth to live young and were called viviparous; reptiles and sharks etc, hatched their young from eggs inside their body and were ovoviviparous, while creatures that laid eggs, as birds, were oviparous.
Warm-blooded, with birdlike and reptilian features and structures, the platypus was clearly unique and its one chamber for its reproductive and excretionary functions (it was called a ‘one-holer’ Down Under) challenged all accepted taxonomic boundaries.
The platypus question, was, of course, not a question in isolation. As expeditions of maritime exploration ranged out and brought back a vast array of new specimens from the remote outposts of the world, the 19th century became the great century of classification, involving the leading biologists of France: Lamarck, Cuvier and Geoffroy St Hilaire, key German anatomists such as Johann Meckel, and Sir Everard Home and Richard Owen in Britain.
From 1800 for some 30 years, scientists wrangled across the Channel about the extraordinary ornithorhynchus from the Antipodes. Was the platypus a mammal? Did it suckle its young? Where were its mammary glands? What implications did it have for their ideas of a Universe of Design and the Chain of Being? Nationally and internationally competitive, the great biologists tried to shoehorn the little creature into their differing systems of classification and philosophical belief.
Geoffroy St Hilaire, a colourful and dynamic figure at the Paris Museum of Natural History, who had coined the new taxonomic order of ‘Monotremata’ for the one-holed platypus and the echidna in 1803, hotly disputed that the platypus was a mammal since, from his dissections, it appeared to lack the necessary mammalian feature of mammary glands. In true Gallic fashion, he demanded, ‘If these are mammary glands, where is the butter?’
As death snatched these leading European protagonists from the scientific stage, the platypus puzzle passed to the younger Richard Owen at the Royal College of Surgeons in London and later the first Director of the British Museum of Natural History. Working on both the Australian monotremes and marsupials and brilliantly reconstructing a vast cavalcade of huge extinct fauna from fossil teeth and bones dredged from British, South African, Australian , New Zealand and South American soils, Owen, ‘a tall man with great glittering eyes’, as his friend the historian Thomas Carlyle described him, was destined to become the high priest of comparative anatomy and palaeontology in Britain, a towering and authoritative leader of Victorian science, courted by royalty, the aristocracy and the church.
It was Owen who, through his dissections in the early 1830s, determined that the platypus had mammary glands, and who, calling on a continuing flood of bottled specimens from the Colonies, espoused the view that the platypus hatched her young within the body and was hence ovoviviparous.
Owen’s close collaborator in Australia was the physician and naturalist, Dr George Bennett, who had studied with Owen at the Royal College of Surgeons and who, settled in New South Wales in 1835, assumed the task of solving the baffling question of the platypus’ mode of generation, in the field.
But for nearly half a century more, the platypus kept its secret, elusive, intensely private, and dug deep with its young into its long labyrinthine burrows. Bennett, an assiduous and perceptive observer, furnished the scientific world with engaging and enlightening papers on the habits and ecology of the animal, but as Owen’s faithful disciple, he remained caught in the great man’s paradigm of ovoviviparous birth.
In Australia, the Aborigines had knowledge of the platypus reproduction and the suckling of its young. But in a climate of opinion dismissive of the indigenous inhabitants, their evidence was both misinterpreted or ignored. In addition, patronising British attitudes towards a convict Colony with its peculiar assortment of bizarre fauna, fuelled a general view that Australia was also something of a zoological penal colony, a faunal Gulag where everything was queer and opposite, a perception that impeded serious consideration of other colonial reportage of the existence of platypus eggs.
As one English writer in 1819 summed up characteristically about Australia: ‘In this remote part of the Earth’, he wrote, ‘Nature, having made horses, oxen, ducks, geese, oaks, elms and all regular productions for the rest of the world, seems determined to have a bit of play, and to amuse herself as she pleases.’
The young Charles Darwin, alive to the scientific debate on the platypus mystery, gave graphic expression to his first sight of the animal at a pastoral property near Bathurst during the ‘Beagle’s’ visit in 1836, jotting in his Diary: ‘A disbeliever in everything beyond his reason might exclaim, surely two distinct Creators must have been at work.’ But shaping his theory of evolution by natural selection later, that ‘wonderful creature’, as he called it, seen in an Australian river on a summer evening drifted in his consciousness and became a persistent player in his maturing ideas on biogeography and the modification and survival of the species through isolation.
Not so for Sir Richard Owen. An entrenched anti-evolutionist who attributed adaptive change in organisms to what he called ‘creative forethought’ and an ‘all wise and powerful First Cause’, he himself offered no mechanisms from his long researches on the fossil record, or on monotremes or marsupial forms, to explain the origin and change of species. Rather, he fiercely repudiated Darwin’s evolutionary evidence and on Darwin’s death, publicly opposed the burial of the great naturalist, ‘the Devil’s chaplain’, in Westminster Abbey.
While Darwin himself was dead when the riddle of platypus birth was solved, it fell, in 1884, to a young Scottish embryologist, William Caldwell, a postgraduate scholar from Cambridge University reared on the works of Darwin, who, researching on the Burnet River in Southern Queensland, rounded up a horde of platypuses with the help of Aborigines and found one female who had just laid one egg, with a second egg dilated at the mouth of her uterus. Staggering to a country telegraph station nearby, Caldwell communicated the terse, arresting news: ‘Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic; which meant, in short, monotremes lay eggs, the soft shelled eggs have large yolks which are absorbed the developing young, as with birds. It was, said Professor Moseley, reading the transmitted message to the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting at the time in Montreal, ‘the most important message in a scientific sense that had ever passed through the submarine cables.’
Pipped to the post, Bennett’s response after 50 years of intermittent vigil in the field, showed some irritation. ‘Who would have thought,’ he wrote Owen, ‘that an animal with so large a milk gland should actually demean itself by laying small white eggs!’
Caldwell, for his part, paid tribute to the Aborigines. ‘Without the help of these people’, he acknowledged, I should have had little chance of success.’
The long, closely guarded secret of the monotremes was out. It had eluded the scientific world for nearly 90 years. The search for it had also caused great carnage in the platypus population. And, in its outcome, Australia had yielded the astonishing phenomenon of fur from eggs!
But other mysteries about the amazing platypus remained to be explored as research and practical knowledge shifted in the 20th century to Australia. Then, far from being a primitive animal, a transitional form between bird and mammal, as 19th and some 20th century scientists insisted, the platypus, with its unique ‘electric beak’ for the electrolocation of food, was found to be a great survivor who had left the mainstream of mammalian evolution a long time ago, to evolve actively in its own interest and to win recognition in the words of monotreme expert Merv Griffiths, as ‘the animal of all time’.
But that is another story.
Robyn Williams: Which we hope to tell you in this very program. The book is ‘The Platypus’, the author is Ann Moyal from Canberra and the publishers are Allen & Unwin.
Next week Ockham’s Razor comes from Perth where Jim Leavesley is dying to tell us about someone whose doings are on everyone’s lips: King Ludwig the Second of Bavaria. I’m Robyn Williams.
Guests:
Anne Moyal
Anne Moyal
109 Dexter Street
Cook, ACT
2614
Her book 'The Platypus'
published by Allen & Unwin
(By order. Currently being re-printed. Should be available in bookshops
in October 2001)
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