Or a wombat: their teeth never stop growing, they poo cubes and they defend themselves with reinforced rears. M without fangs and they can detect electricity. Winner of the Whitley Award for Best Natural History Book 2022A compelling, funny, first-hand account of Australia's wonderfully unique mammals and how our perceptions impact their future.Think of a platypus: they lay eggs (that hatch into so-called platypups), they produce milk without nipples and veno

Platypuses, possums, wombats, echidnas, devils, kangaroos – and many of the other Australian animals few people have ever heard of – are fascinating and worthy of knowing and protecting.Show more This reputation haunts zoologist Jack Ashby, and so in this seminal book straight from the field, he describes the fauna of Australia in all their glory. This debate raged across centuries and has been characterised by a stubborn insistence that the monotremes and marsupials are somehow more primitive than the mammals of Europe and the Americas. It was unclear where scientists should place them in the tree of life, and the carefully ordered taxonomical system of the day was called in to question. Quite unlike anything anyone in Europe had seen before, the creatures possessed a mysterious mix of features which science had previously been characterised as either mammalian, reptilian or avian. Upon ‘discovery’ by western science, the biology of the platypus and its fellow egg-laying mammal, the echidna became a touchstone for the battle around evolution. From the moment of its discovery, it has played a disruptive role in the narrative of evolution, and perhaps due to this rocky start, or to the lasting legacy of colonialism, most of us still know very l The platypus is an amazing animal – A mammal that lays eggs, produces venom and detects electricity.

Animal Kingdom by Jack Ashby