Word: echidnas
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...While in Britain the poor starved, the colonists of Van Diemen's Land enjoyed plenty - kangaroo, oysters, wombat, echidna "stuffed with sage and onion." There was no money for prisons, so many convicts "simply wandered off to live a life of quiet freedom in the well-watered, game-rich bush". With absorbing detail and first-hand accounts, Boyce shows that while life in this new world was hard, it was, for many, better than what they'd left behind. One convict wrote of being "unaccountably indifferent" to the notion of returning home. Hunters, bushrangers and soldiers wore kangaroo and possum...
...three-month stint as a jackeroo--a ranch hand who wrangles sheep and cattle in the Australian outback--during his gap year between high school and college. Stopping at the Taronga Park Zoo for a photo op with local wildlife, Harry struggled to get a safe grip on this echidna. Also bristling were some Australian politicians, who complained about the $400,000 it costs to guard his highness. Of course the boost in tourism dollars from schoolgirls and lurking paparazzi should help offset the bill...
Temple-Smith agreed that if the platypus is compared with its only closest evolutionary relative, the echidna, the gaits don't match. "How do you reconcile these things?" Jenkins, who has studied the echidna's walk, asked. Temple-Smith responded, "When you look at the echidna, you're looking at a very different kettle of fish...
Jenkins keeps an echidna named Frances on the second floor of the new MCZ labs. He has been studying the locomotion of the echidna, which is a Mesozoic mammal. So is the platypus, but before Jenkins makes conclusions about those early mammals, he says he has to determine what makes them living fossils. "The difficulty in using these as analogs for Mesozoic mammals is that on top of their primitive features are a whole range of specialized features related to their aquatic and fossorial [digging] functions," Jenkins says...
...watching the seals slither through the blue water. Looking at the monkeys, a zoogoer can conclude that they resemble the family in the apartment downstairs-or a family uncomfortably like his own. Looking at a tiger, he can feel weak, unarmed and humble; at a gorilla, helpless; at an echidna (a mammal that lays eggs), vastly superior. Zoo men have built their exhibits on the proposition that if the proper study of mankind is man, a subsidiary and equally wholesome occupation is the contemplation of the lower animals...