The myriad of strange and fascinating creatures covering the planet and swimming in the oceans is nothing short of wondrous. Throughout evolutionary history, a great many wonderfully weird creatures have come and gone. Suppose one explores the Cambrian periodâs fossil beds. In that case, you might speculate you were studying an alien world and not our own. Nature has produced more than a few oddities since the Cambrian period. As science began to uncover our past and explore our present, perhaps no other creature alive today has sparked more curiosity than the duckbill platypus. The platypus was well known to the native people of Australia. Still, it was a confusing mess to the first British zoologist who studied it. In 1799, George Shaw first pulled a platypus from the alcohol, preserving the specimen. His first thought was that this was a forgery or a joke. He promptly began looking for the stitching where someone had sewed a duckâs bill onto a beaver-like mammal. Their strange biology seemed too unreal to be possibly true, but here it was. In the 1800s, investigating a new species meant dissections and field observations. Today, science investigates a bit deeper. The traditional anatomy studies and field observation are still perfectly viable, but if you want the dirt on a species, you must examine the genome.