Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my.

And so. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 70, Animal Diversity Part 2.

And I'm your host, James Fodor.

So this episode continues directly on from the previous episode, unsurprisingly, Animal Diversity Part 1,

where I went through and discussed the diversity of the animal kingdom right through and looked at all the different filer.

And particularly, I also focused on the orders of the animal kingdom right through and looked at all the different phyla, and particularly I also focused on the orders within the chordate phyla, which is where humans sit.

In this episode, I'm going to move on to talk about our favorite class of chordates, which

are the mammals, 5,500 species, and we'll be going through these in a rather a bit more detail than we have been for the other classes, because obviously humans are mammals and most of the animals that we sort of know about and are familiar with are also mammals. And so I think it's a bit particularly useful to have an understanding of how the mammalian class is structured and fits together.

So I'll actually be going through all of the main families of the mammalian class,

which is actually fairly low down in the taxonomic hierarchy.

If you recall, family is the second lowest level of classical level of classification,

just above genus and then species.

Okay, so let's make a start.

If you perhaps recall from having herb before, mammals are essentially animals that have

fur and suckle their young, they give birth to live young, which they then suckle, as opposed

to birds and reptiles and amphibians, which lay eggs, except when mammals don't, which brings me now to discussing that the first main group of mammals, which is actually a subclass, and these are the monotremes.

Monotremes are a very special, strange order of mammals.

So this is an order within the class of mammals.

The echinor and the platypus, each of which have their own family, found in Australia.

And they were a very big surprise when they were first discovered by Europeans, because

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