Platypus milk is the unlikely source of a protein that could help fight off infections, according to a group of scientists in Australia. The growing use of antibiotics over the past century has led to ...

Platypuses are, plainly put, oddly shaped — those flat bills, beaver-like tails and venomous spurs. Now it seems an unusual ringlet-like protein in their milk could help in the fight against superbugs ...

The platypus is about as bizarre and contradictory as animals come. The semi-aquatic Australian creatures are mammals, but they lay eggs instead of giving live birth. They have bills like ducks, but ...

"The platypus is the only venomous mammal in the world," says Zedrosser. Males have venomous spurs on their hind legs, which they use during the mating season to fight other males. The venom can't ...

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 ...

When the British naturalist George Shaw received a weird specimen from Australia in 1799 -- one with a mole's fur, a duck's bill and serpentlike spurs on its rear legs -- he did what any skeptical ...