It would be hard to find a stronger creature in the world than the duck-billed platypus that lives in Australia and Tasmania.  It is also the strangest creature.

What makes this “impossible” creature so odd is that it has a bill like a duck, where most other mammals have noses and lips.  It has the soft thick fur of a mole, and a paddle-shaped tall like a beaver.

Duck Billed-Platypus

It has webbed feet, too, and it lays eggs and hatches them like a chicken.  But after the eggs have hatched, the mother platypus nurses her babies with milk as do other mammals.

A fully grown duckbill may be nearly two feet long counting its tail, and weight 6 pounds.  This shy creature spend most of the day hiding in a grass-lined den, deep in some mud bank.

Like beavers, platypuses live in streams and ponds.  they do not build dams, but dig deep tunnels far into the bank, from under water.  The long upward-sloping tunnel leads to the “living room.”

The shy platypus is seldom seen.  it hides deep in its burrow by day.  It comes out at night to hunt for worms, snails, and other small water creatures which it digs up which it finds by stirring the muddy stream bottom of the pond with its rubbery bill. – Dick Rogers