Are You Peculiar?
Are You Peculiar? Mary Ann Wray We’ve all seen some peculiar things in our lives ranging from the fictional to the real. I’ll never forget the first time I heard about and saw a duck-billed platypus as a youngster. This creature is part mammal and bird. The platypus is the only kind and living representative of its family and genus in the animal kingdom. It hatches from an egg like a reptile or a bird, but it grows fur and has mammary glands to feed milk to its young. It is warm-blooded unlike a bird or reptile. It lives on land but spends a lot of its time in water. Platypus have a bill like a duck and webbed feet like an otter. It’s sort of a ‘misfit’ in the animal kingdom-an anomaly of sorts since it’s a mixture of several other animal species. There is no other living creature like it on earth. The Merriam-Webster definition for the word peculiar is: characteristic of only one person, group, or thing; different from the usual or normal: stra...