The Big Muddy Monster Festival celebrates the mysterious creature with vendors, food trucks, speakers and presentations about the Big Muddy Monster.

An illustration of the platypus from 'The Naturalist's Miscellany.'. The Naturalist's Miscellany/Wikimedia Commons/CC0 1.0 When naturalist George Shaw first described the platypus in 1799 in the ...

The platypus search was part of ‘Eyes on Country’, a First Nations-led project established by the World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia with funding support from Google.org.

How long did it take to spot the platypus? The likelihood of seeing a platypus was described as “a needle in a haystack” by World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia. Its Eyes on Country program ...

It’s this motion that allows the platypus to easily find its food beneath the debris. The platypus doesn’t find its meal through eyesight, in fact, it closes its eyes while hunting.

She asked: ‘Did you know the platypus… doesn’t rely on its eyes for hunting?’” Wei said in a September 25 profile by TechXplore.

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The cave-dwelling form of the Mexican tetra, for example, doesn’t have eyes, but it does still have the genes for developing them – they’ve just been silenced.

“Platypus are such weird animals that it would make sense for them to have weird biochemistry,” said Janet Newman, a scientist at Australia’s national science agency CSIRO, in a statement.

Koalas, platypuses, echidnas, turtles, birds and other native species face a deadly threat if an outbreak of venomous fire ants is not eradicated. The federal Environment Department has told a ...