This Shrimp Creates Temperatures Hotter Than The Sun's Surface

In 1799, a dried animal skin arrived in London and a respected zoologist named George Shaw took a pair of scissors to it — hunting for the taxidermy stitches he was certain a fraudster had used to sew a duck's bill onto a mammal. There were no stitches. The platypus was real. And it would take another eighty-five years, and a telegram from a researcher in Australia in 1884, before science accepted the rest of it: that this mammal lays eggs. That reaction — flat disbelief, followed by evidence that refuses to go away — is the thread running through this entire documentary. We look at the okapi, known to people living alongside it for centuries and dismissed by Western naturalists as a confused mash-up of donkey, zebra and giraffe until skin samples reached the Natural History Museum in 1901. The giant squid, filed under sailors' folklore and Norse kraken myths until bodies started washing up in Newfoundland in the 1870s — thirteen meters long, with eyes the size of dinner plates, and still not photographed alive until 2004. And the coelacanth, a lobe-finned fish believed to have died with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, until a South African museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer took a phone call from a fisherman in December 1938. The ichthyologist she sent her sketch to said it was like watching a ghost walk into his laboratory. #StrangeAnimals #FullDocumentary #DeepSeaCreatures #Biology #Tardigrade #Platypus #NatureDocumentary #ScienceDocumentary