Yesterday I thought I saw a platypus! This deserves an exclamation mark due to its unexpectedness – I didn’t set out to find one, but to paraphrase the Bard, some people achieve platypus and some have platypus thrust upon them. I hadn’t given platypi much thought – there was a vague notion that they were rare, possibly endangered, and therefore not likely to be stumbled on while doing other things.

To experience the mountain gorilla in the wild, you have to travel to Rwanda, or Uganda, or perhaps Republic of Congo if you’re feeling brave. To experience the platypus, we travelled to Queanbeyan, NSW, a town not far from Canberra, for an orthodontic appointment. While Daniela suffered in the chair, I went wandering and happened on the Queanbeyan River – which isn’t hard as it runs through the middle of town, more or less.

I had my camera with me – some photographer once said that the best camera is the one you have with you, which always rings true when you see a great photo opportunity but have left the house without the means to record it. Although this saw is increasingly unlikely in the smartphone era, I challenge you to take a good close, sharp wildlife photo with a phone.

Accordingly, on the off chance that I might see and photograph a kingfisher, I strolled along the riverside – a very urbanised riverside, with a concrete path for walkers, runners, rollerbladers and pram-pushers. And there in a tree, right by the bank, was a little mud nest.

That’s a Magpie Lark incubating his/her eggs. If she looks a bit ruffled, that’s because it was a pretty windy day and you can clearly see her feathers being rubbed the wrong way. This is why she’s wearing that pissed-off glare.

Anyway, while manoeuvring around to take that pic, my phone rang, and as I took it out to answer, there appeared a brownish animal, mostly under the surface but with a little bit of head protruding, swimming strongly with a side-to-side motion of the rear end. Beaver? Otter? Well, neither exists in Aus, so by a process of elimination, it must have been your duck-billed local aquatic mammal. But, being on a call, I couldn’t photograph it – a case of the best phone is the one you have on you.

So, you know, having spotted what amounts to little more than a bow wave in the water, I had to read up on the platypus – and it is truly weird: it lays eggs but nurses its young; the males have a poisonous spur on their hind legs; they use their ‘beaks’ for electrolocation; they can retract the webbing between their front claws when on land. It’s an animal designed by a committee of children who read fantasy novels.

But best of all is the tale that when the dried remains of the first platypus sent back to the UK were examined, scientists suspected it was a hoax – “It naturally excites the idea of some deceptive preparation by artificial means,” they said in their 1799 report.

And as if that report gave people ideas, numerous ‘deceptive preparations by artificial means’ sprang up in subsequent years.

There was the 1822 case of the Fiji mermaid, which had the torso and head of a monkey mated to a fish’s body and tail, all arranged in as grotesque a manner as possible. Created by Japanese seamen and sold to a gullible ship’s captain for $6,000 – surely a huge sum at the time – it was exhibited at freak shows over the next 20 years until it came to the attention of  P.T. Barnum. He leased it from its owner to display in his museum and embarked on a massive PR campaign to promote it – knowing it was probably fake.

Another taxidermic fake-up is the Jackalope. Invented in 1930, this mythical Wyoming beast was created by implanting deer antlers into the skull of a jackrabbit (what we’d call a hare). The makers found themselves with something of a hit on their hands and manufactured many more, alongside colourful tales designed to enhance its myth. For example, Jackalopes can imitate the human voice; the best bait for trapping them is whiskey; they can only reproduce during thunderstorms.

Now that we know that the platypus is definitely real, it seems a bit rude to assume that it was tacked together in some animal-stuffer’s workshop. The Fiji Mermaid and the Jackalope are really crude and not well thought-through. The platypus does display some remarkable traits, but they’re real — it doesn’t need a P.T. Barnum or market-savvy taxidermist to create its myths. (Although its young do look as if they were created by a Hollywood special effects team.)

So yes, when you have a mammal with a bird-like bill who lays eggs, suckles its young without nipples, uses its tail for both propulsion and fat storage, and becomes venomous in the mating season — you really couldn’t make it up. Not even out of the parts of other animals, grafted, stuffed and mounted.