A long, long time ago, back during the ever so distant days of high school, I performed in the annual school musical. Now, if any of you find picturing me in a musical to be different, please keep in mind that my roles were minimal, and having to memorize lines was no problem for me due to the dearth and sometimes nonexistence of lines for me to memorize. Now that we have gotten that out of the way, let us turn our attention to what I find truly epic and interesting. Since I went to a Catholic high school during my junior and senior years, we would always hold hands and pray in a gigantic circle before every performance. One of the more interesting prayers that we did was the platypus prayer.

While most of its details have now escaped my mind’s grasp, from what I can remember, the platypus prayer remarked on how odd platypuses are and how they seem to be hodgepodges of different body parts from numerous different animals. I do not remember how this was worked into the form of a prayer, but I do find it very interesting how humans view platypuses. Most of us see them as strange beings that are very alien to the world compared to all the other animals alive today, especially when compared to modern mammals. Europeans were amazed when they first encountered the platypus in 1798. When the first platypus specimen arrived in Britain, zoologist George Shaw thought that someone had sewn a duck’s beak onto some form of beaver-like animal.

George Shaw

He even started to cut up the specimen with scissors in his search for stitches. Robin Williams even joked that God was stoned when He created the platypus.

Robin Williams

However, all this is an illusion created by our own very egocentric minds. In reality, the world has been used to platypuses for 125 million years. The earliest known relative of the platypus is Teinolophos from Australia, followed by Steropodon from 110 million years ago in Australia.

Steropodon

As you can see in this reconstruction of Steropodon by paleoartist Nobu Tamura, the platypus form was already well developed even 110 million years ago. although odd, the platypus body plan is nothing new to this world. Meanwhile, we humans, the strange hairless bipedal apes who somehow manage to survive outside normal primate habitats, are the truly foreign creatures of this world, having been around for only 200,000 years, and at most only 8 million years if you include all bipedal primates. In fact, the modern platypus species itself has been around for 9 million years, already at least a million years older than even our earliest bipedal ancestors.

As my deliberation group learned this past Monday, being mostly Schreyer Scholars and Paterno Fellows, we are rather in a bubble, as we quickly found out when we realized that none of us knew anything about trade schools. In a way, all humans are in a bubble. We are so used to our own cultures, perceptions, experiences, and values that anything that falls outside of them, such as “strange” creatures such as platypuses, we immediately label as weird and view in a different light even if what’s “weird” has already been around for hundreds of millions of years longer than we have. This innate egocentricity is something that we should try our best to overcome while reminding ourselves that it also makes us all human and gives us all one common trait that we can feel united under.