While researching Australia for the upcoming comics, I ran across some interesting facts about platypuses:
- Platypuses are found only in eastern Australia.
- Platypuses hunt underwater by detecting electric impulses in their prey.
- Male platypuses are venomous.
- No platypuses are poisonous; in fact, they are delicious.
- The platypus is the national animal of Australia.
- It is also the national animal of France, but only because one starred opposite Jerry Lewis in Le Travailleur Farfelu de l’Usine des Berets (The Crazy Beret Factory Worker) in 1962.
- Despite being mammals, platypuses lay eggs. The only other mammals to do so are dolphins and birds.
- Wilford Brimley is not a talking platypus. He is a talking walrus.
- President Grover Cleveland was rumored to be a platypus in a very elaborate disguise, but this is false. To date, no platypus has ever reached an office higher than cabinet-level secretary.
- It’s well known that communists are scared of platypuses, but the reverse is true as well. Ronald Reagan famously won the Cold War by airlifting platypuses to Soviet-occupied Berlin, an operation known as “The Peloponnesian War.”
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