The new research could upend what’s known of the evolution of the most primitive mammals alive today. Found in Australia and New Guinea, the platypus and echidna are called monotremes ...

Thirty years ago, a small bone was discovered at Dinosaur Cove in southeastern Australia. The find could reshape the current ...

The study, published Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges the conventional understanding of the platypus and echidna’s evolution. “Our study indicates that the ...

An analysis of the genome can help scientists piece together a more complete picture of the evolution of all mammals, including humans. The duck-billed platypus: part bird, part reptile, ...

The platypus and four echidna species ... years ago -- they are also "very important for understanding mammalian evolution," he said. Indeed, some monotreme traits that seem so strange may ...

It was bigger than any platypus known before. The team had just shaken up platypus evolution. The ancient platypus belongs to a tiny group of egg-laying mammals called monotremes, of which only ...

It's likely an example of convergent evolution, in which unrelated species evolve similar traits. So while many things about the platypus remain mysterious. Young notes that there is "some ...

Scientists believe that at some point during platypus evolution, the mammal lost its teeth to make room for the many nerve cells needed to send information from its bill to its brain. While the ...

“All of these genes are highly conserved in vertebrates, reflecting a unique pattern of evolution in the platypus genome not previously seen in other mammalian genomes,” the authors wrot ...

Photo / Supplied Our most distant relative, the platypus, has a lot to teach us about sex and evolution. University of Adelaide's Associate Professor Frank Grutzner says it's played a key role in ...