April fool animals.

In the spirit of April fools day I thought I do a post about animals that you’d think were made up but are 100% real!!

The first and most obvious is the duckbill platypus!! They are one of the 5 monotremes species, which means they are a mammal that leys eggs instead of giving birth to live young! They are also venomous; males have a spur on their hind leg, which injects venom that causes immense pain to humans!! Their appearance is described as being duck-billed, beaver tailed and otter footed. When they were first discovered they completely confused scientists. It is the only animal of the family ornithorhynchidae but there have been some fossils found that belong to the family, so in other words they’re not related to any other living animal!! The platypus can be found on the Australian 20 cent coil and they are the emblem of New South Wales!

The next one you might have heard of: the cookie cutter shark. No I’m not joking that’s really its name although it can also be called the cigar shark. They are related to dogfish shark and are found worldwide in warm ocean waters. It’s named the “cookie cutter” shark because of their strange feeding habits where they will gouge a circular hole out of large animals like a cookie cutter does out of dough. They’ve been known to take chunks out of squid, marine mammals, humans and even submarines. Their dark colouring appears to mimic the outline of a smaller fish while the rest of the body blends into the surroundings, so when a predator approaches they attach themselves to the side of the animal using their suction cup like lips and uses their ban-saw like teeth to take a bite out of them. Although they are no particularly dangerous to humans there are cases of human attacks, imagine looking down and finding a hole in your leg!!!

The next animal I have mentioned before as I’ve seen them in the wid. I’m talking about the proboscis monkey, indigenous to the island of Borneo. I’m mainly mentioning these because of their very funny noses. The males have a large droopy nose while the females have a small upturned nose.

My next mention goes to the star-nosed mole. If you ask me it’s face looks like their an upturned spider or a lot of very small worms has been stuck to it. They live in wetland areas of North America and like European moles, they eat small insects, worms and molluscs (snails and stuff). They are active day and night, all year round. They live in shallow tunnels just below the surface of the ground. There is very little known about their behaviour. Unlike normal moles they have long tails and scaled feet. They use the strange tentacles on the end of their nose to identify food by touch.

The final animal on my list I thought they were fake when someone first told me about them. Marine iguanas, they sound very fake don’t they? They are one of the unique animals found on the Galapagos Islands. Charles Darwin described them beautifully:

“The black Lava rocks on the beach are frequented by large (2-3 ft), disgusting clumsy Lizards. They are as black as the porous rocks over which they crawl & seek their prey from the Sea. I call them 'imps of darkness'. They assuredly well become the land they inhabit.”

I’m mainly mentioning marine iguanas because they prompted a long runny joke amongst some of my friends while we were in Borneo. They made up an animal called the ‘land jellyfish’ in order to scare one of the girls on the trip with us. She stopped believing they were real when people started talking about ‘arboreal jellyfish’.