“Up until now, history has accorded the classification and illustration to George Shaw and his Naturalist’s Miscellany (1799). A naturalist of some standing with experience in classifying the other Monotreme, the echidna, he classified the ‘water mole’ as Platypus anatinus—the duck billed platypus. The two splendid coloured plates by Frederick Nodder together with their English and Latin descriptions gave the animal important authenticity in a society where clever hoaxes were well known. It sparked a debate between the creationists and evolutionists about how the animal fitted into the various classification schemes of the day. Enter Sir Joseph Banks and Johann Blumenbach. It would seem that Banks gave his German colleague, a distinguished naturalist and comparative anatomist, a specimen in 1799. The following year Blumenbach published in his Abbildungen naturhistorischer Gegenstande (v. 5, no. 41) a description and plate of the platypus naming it—Ornithorhynchus paradoxus or Das Schnabelthier. From here the taxonomic and bibliographic plots thicken. In 1798 the Verlag des Landes-Industrie Comptoirs began a lavish publication—a children’s illustrated encyclopedia essentially of natural history, in 237 parts. It was to include 1186 handcoloured engraved plates of high quality with short descriptions in German and French, eventually bound into 12 volumes. It was one of the first and finest German picture books for children following in the tradition of Comenius’s Orbis pictis. There in 1798, specifically no.80, v.3, appeared two illustrations and a description of Das Schnabelthier (Ornithorhynchus paradoxus)—exactly the same classification which was puzzling the world and as issued by Blumenbach a couple of years later. Harry Burrell in his definitive work The Platypus (1927) gives a tantalising clue. Banks sent a platypus specimen to Blumenbach as early as 1796. With Blumenbach working in Germany it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to give Bertuch in Weimar information about this strange creature if he had received a specimen that early. But why publish it in a children’s magazine?” (V. Horky – Platypus Paradoxes)
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