Scientific Illustration

biomedicalephemera:

I like how that platypus over on the left side seen as being just as related to birds and reptiles as they are to mammals. Those buggers messed up our organization of animals for quite a while.

Actually, in 1833,  a lot of naturalists still didn’t believe that the platypus was, well, “real”. They thought the specimens that had been brought back and stuffed were hoaxes! There was a report of an 1840s Paris Zoological Society meeting where one of the stuffed specimens was brought in, and some of the members were trying to find where the beak and venomous spine and webbed feet were connected. They nearly destroyed it!

Dictionnaire Pittoresque d’Histoire Naturelle et des Phenomenes de la Nature. F. E. Guerin, 1833.