Off the Mark by Mark Parisi for November 12, 2024

Funny, you don’t look girandish.

If you looks back long enough then all creatures is gots the same ancestors anyways.

I think he’s a beaverduck.

There’s gotta be a duck in there somewhere.

Must be a scam.

He appears to be a duck billed platypus.

I once traced my ancestry back to a cow named Auðhumla (aka Auðumbla, you can look her up on Wikipedia).

Get off the internet. Call gramma.

Little known fact, the duckbill Platypus did not board Noah’s Ark, but did disembark.

Monotremes had the right idea. Why did live bearing become the main thing, anyway?

God’s little practical joke.

Not what the rest of us expected, either. I was imagining a cross between a duck and a beaver.

It turns out that he was adapted… more commonly known as “evolved”.

Needs a fedora…

The platypus is a Monotremata mammal — one of three subdivisions of the Mammal class [the other two being Marsupialia and Placental]. Placental is by far the largest group, including all mammals where the fetus is nourished via a placenta and carried in the mother’s uterus until a late stage of development — when the fetus is fairly well developed.

Marsupials also nourish the fetus via placenta but only for a very short time. They give birth to a very underdeveloped fetus and then carry and raise their young in a pouch.

The platypus, and its only living relatives, the echnidas [spiny anteaters], lay eggs. The monotremes branched off the mammal tree first, about 166 million years ago and split into the platypus and echnida branches around 40 million years ago.

I would have thought duck and beaver

…and he said, “Put it on my bill!”

Wait till Ancestry.com sends his bill.

Ancestry keeps improving. Next month he’ll be part zebra, part hippo

Some mating results require a why and how.

Go back far enough and it will find not just the duck and beaver, but also a rooster and a venomous snake.

The old joke was after making all the other animals god had a bunch of leftover parts that he put together to make the platypus.

The other monotreme loved it, he was like echidna candy store.

You would think platypus pre-dates either of those animals.

More like duck + beaver + something toxic.