Factoid Friday: The Amazing Echidna

So I heard that the blog was pretty good and mostly amusing, except for Factoid Fridays. Well, my friends, learning is totally fun too! Especially when the learning involves echidnas! And exclamation marks!


Echidnas are basically a hodge-podge, mash-it-all-together of mammal/bird pieces. Or, to science it up, they are a deep branching lineage that split off close to the common relative of all mammals, birds and reptiles. It's evolution, baby!

What makes echidnas objectively the coolest thing ever, rivaled only by the platypus (the echidnas cousin of sorts)? For starters, they look like an anteater and a porcupine got into some weird Dr. Moreau kind of romance. Check out this hairy guy holding a balled up echidna:

They are mammals, but they lay eggs like birds; after laying the egg, the female echidna deposits it into a pouch (like kangaroos), where the young continue to live after hatching. They also don't have nipples, but have two pores on their chests out of which their young can suckle milk. To make the young even cooler, we call baby echidnas "puggles". To top it all off, male echidnas have a four-headed penis. Two of them are useless, and they alternate using the other two, depending on which was used last. That, dear reader, is weird enough to put them at the top of my crazy animal list. I hope that made Factoid Friday more interesting!