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Animal Themes
Mammals
Freshwater

Platypuses

Platypuses
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 4 to 8
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   8.8

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    echidna, fraud, hairless, lengthy, riverbanks, swimsuit, tunnel-like, lays, propel, presented, immediately, encounter, hence, specimen, entire, species
     content words:    British Museum, Natural History

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Platypuses   
1     Can you picture an animal that has a beak shaped like a duck's, a tail that resembles a beaver's, and a bone structure that is similar to a reptile's? Oh, did I also mention that this strange-looking animal lays eggs? Well, if you have a hard time depicting what this animal may look like, you are not alone.
 
2     When the British settlers in Australia had their first encounter with the platypus in 1797, they could not believe what they found. Was the platypus a bird, a mammal, or a reptile? Upon learning about the discovery and examining the specimen, scientists back in England discredited it as a fraud. Suspecting that the presented specimen was made by stitching many different animals' body parts together, one scientist even used a pair of scissors to try to pry the "duck's beak" off the specimen! This very first platypus specimen, with scissor marks still visible, is preserved and on display in the British Museum of Natural History in London.
 
3     After many lengthy debates that lasted for almost a century, scientists finally confirmed that the platypus is a mammal. They classified it, along with the other two egg-laying mammal species (the short-beaked echidna and the long-beaked echidna), as monotremes.

Paragraphs 4 to 10:
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