TO GAZE UPON A PLATYPUS is to witness a jumble of contradictions. With the furry, floppy body of an otter, a duck’s hard bill, and a rooster’s set of spurs (tipped with venom on the males!), the animal looks like a collaborative effort, a lark, the goofball product of a surrealist’s game of exquisite corpse come alive to waddle off a sketchbook page. For here is a mammal, who, in her tight riverbank burrow, lays a pair of leathery eggs around which she will curl, beak to tail, sharing her warmth until they hatch—at which point her twin puggles will cuddle close and suckle the milk that seeps from their mother’s skin with their little thumbnail bills. Even when you see one with your own eyes—say, paddling underwater, absorbed in her crepuscular rooting—the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) remains hard to believe.

So while the Aboriginal peoples of eastern Australia have been telling Dreamtime stories about these boondaburras and mallangongs for centuries, you can forgive the Europeans (for this, at least) who were incredulous when the first preserved specimen sailed in at the turn of the nineteenth century. When naturalist George Shaw, keeper of the British Museum’s natural history collection, lifted the stuffed creature from its wrapping, he thought he held a cryptid. A sophisticated hoax. Only after poking around with a pair of scissors, looking in vain for a huckster’s hidden stitches, did he concede this anomaly of evolution was, in fact, legit. After much dithering, a cadre of scientists ultimately gave the beast its own brand-new order, Monotremata, a small table it shares to this day with only a handful of spiky echidnas, those fellow egg-laying mammals.

Like many fabled beasts, monotremes possess a strange magic. Theirs is electroreception. You see, a platypus’s bill is covered in specialized cells that allow them to navigate with eyes closed, detecting movement, changes in pressure, and even the electrical pulses wafting off the crustaceans, worms, and mollusks they favor for dinner—suggesting that, yes, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.