A dead platypus doesn't just look like a hoax.

They look like a bad hoax.

They look like the final result of gathering the least thoughtful pranksters in the world and telling them to create a fake animal.

Now, hoax animals have really gone out of style lately, but before internet trolling,

this was one of the best ways to cause pointless trouble, IRL. One entomologist got a fake

butterfly species classified by simply painting on real butterflies with ink. A couple of dudes in Wyoming

put antlers on a rabbit, and people still look up if

jackalopes are real, even today. Audubon, the man himself, made up dozens of animals purely to

prank people, including fish with bulletproof scales. Some East Asian artisans managed to create quite a buzz by sewing monkeys together with fish.

And my favorite example, an obscure cockroach biologist created an elaborate alternate life for

himself in which he was, instead, a shrew expert with a specialty in nose rats.

A group of species he made up that walk by hopping around on their noses.

This guy wrote a fictional scientific literature around these creatures, which Sabrina Imbler,

writing for Atlas Obscura, describes as so jargony and dense it was, quote,

hard to even know where to begin to question it, end quote.

The bigger your words, the less questionable your credentials.

So it was in this context of this lost animal trolling culture that the platypus emerged.

A nearly two-foot-long furry animal with a duck-like bill, a beaver-like tail,

webbed feet, large claws, and no nipples.

Needless to say, some people were a little suspicious of this discovery.

In 1799, dead specimens were described by the scientific community who variously disregarded it and took it with a grain of salt.

I know that if I was alive back then, I wouldn't be confused as to whether or not this was a hoax.

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