I am a fan of the platypus. But I have never seen a platypus in person, for I live in New York City and not Australia. But thanks to a 2023 article in Mental Floss, I now know that New York City’s Bronx Zoo welcomed three platypuses in 1947 and three more in 1958 after the last of the three 1947 platypuses passed away (it previously had a platypus in 1922). All three of the 1958 platypuses died within a year of arriving in the Bronx Zoo, which seems to have caused the Bronx Zoo to give up on its monotreme dreams (see the Mental Floss article for the dramatic details of the Bronx Zoo’s ultimately failed platypus experiments). While I missed out on my chance to see platypuses at the Bronx Zoo due to my not having been born yet, I became aware that the San Diego Zoo, which hosts the only platypuses in America, has an online Platypus Cam.
The Former Bronx Zoo Platypuses
Penelope came to the U.S. from her native Australia in April 1947 with two other platypuses, Cecil (a male) and Betty Hutton (a female). The news made headlines across the nation: It was only the second time any platypus had visited the U.S. (the first had died after about seven weeks in The Bronx in 1922), and the general public was still tickled by the notion that such a Frankensteinian creature—in all its duck-billed, beaver-tailed, egg-laying glory—actually existed. Even New York Zoological Society president Fairfield Osborn called it 'literally the strangest animal.'