Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Vs from Gimlin.

There's a lot going on right now and when we heard this science news story, we just thought

it's the perfect thing that you might need.

It seems like there's a global need to talk about platypus right now.

Yeah, I hear that.

I hear that.

This is Dr. Paula Annick.

She studies mammals at Northland College in Wisconsin and her team has just made a very

cool discovery that the egg-laying duck-billed platypus has fur that can glow.

And the story of how Paula's team worked this out is one hell of a yurika moment.

They'd all started with a quest that had nothing to do with platypus'es.

Paula's colleague was walking in the woods in northern Wisconsin, looking for lycan, using

this special flashlight that beams UV light.

And he noticed that when his beam accidentally landed on a flying squirrel, the flying squirrel

looked bright pink, bright pink.

Bright pink.

I mean, it's been described as rose pink or bubblegum pink.

This shock of pink fur in an otherwise pooh-brown squirrel was startling.

The fur was bio-florescing.

That means that when UV light is being done it, the light bounces off the fur

in this awesome way, so it ends up looking pink.

And other animals do this bio-florescing thing too, like some kinds of fish and coral.

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