A paddle of platypuses.

• Author: Horky, Wanda
• Position: National Library of Australia

Despite the platypus being a solitary creature, the National Library has recently turned into a sort of platypusary having acquired three works written over 30 years between 1803 and 1836 and, covering the 1830s, the period of heated scientific debate over its classification, anatomy and physiology.

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'Australia's iconic platypus is an aquatic mammal which lays eggs'--

This benign phrase in all its aspects was hotly debated in England and Europe in the nineteenth century. Was it a bird, mammal or reptile?--as it had characteristics of all three animals. It also played an important role in Charles Darwin's ideas on isolation and species diversity in his On the Origin of Species (1859).

Naturalists thought the first dried specimen (reaching England in 1799) was a hoax yet this 'highly interesting novelty' would take another 90 years to...