duckbilled

Updated: May 11, 2025

Australia, in fact, stands alone: it possesses no apes or monkeys, no cats or tigers, wolves, bears, or hyenas; no deer or antelopes, sheep or oxen; no elephant, horse, squirrel, or rabbit; none, in short, of those familiar types of quadruped which are met with in every other part of the world. Instead of these, it has Marsupials only: kangaroos and opossums; wombats and the duckbilled Platypus.

Alfred Russel Wallace - The Malay Archipelago, the land of the orang-utan and the bird of paradise; a narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature — Volume 1