In the dense, humid forests of the Late Triassic, long before mammals ruled the night, a small, shrew-like creature scurried beneath the ferns. This ancestor—our shared forebear with the platypus—was warm-blooded, fur-covered, and likely laid soft-shelled eggs. It represents the last hazy moment before the mammalian lineage fully diverged: one path leading to the egg-laying monotremes, the other eventually giving rise to marsupials and placental mammals, and much later, apes and humans.
The platypus feels odd to us: a duck-like bill, fur, warm blood, and egg-laying all wrapped into one animal. It doesn’t feel like a mammal, yet it undeniably is one. The truth is, evolution didn’t jump cleanly from synapsids to modern mammals. It moved slowly, branching, overlapping, and entangling traits along the way.
The last common ancestor of platypus and ape lived around 225 million years ago, during the Late Triassic. It wasn’t a modern mammal yet, but a very late synapsid—or early mammaliaform—already carrying the essentials: fur for insulation, a warm-blooded metabolism, and mammal-style teeth. From this small, generalized creature, every living mammal would diverge—both the strange egg-laying platypus and the most self-aware ape.
While dinosaurs were just beginning their ascent toward dominance, this humble animal carried the spark of something different: not just fur, but milk; not just survival, but endurance through deep time. Its descendants would adapt, shrink, and diversify through extinction after extinction, quietly refining the traits that define mammals today.
Only one branch of egg-laying mammals survives now: the Australasian monotremes—the platypus and four species of echidna. Much later, around 185 million years ago, mammals with live birth appeared, marking another major evolutionary turn. But the older story still lives on, quietly, in rivers and forests half a world away.
