The Story of Oliver, the short-beaked echidna, begins here. A single fertilized egg. Well, technically, I suppose it started here. Oliver’s parents, Jacko and Charlotte, were in a back alley and had just shared a half a can of Fosters, which is quite a bit for an echidna by the way.

And let’s just say that passion got the better of them. Got the whole thing on a security camera. But you notice that it’s a bit of a delicate process, which takes some time. They are echidnas after all. Look a bit like a feather duster from a fetish club. So let’s just say that the Echidina Kamasutra doesn’t exactly have that many pages in it.

More like a pamphlet. But listen, besides navigating the pointy bits, you’ve got the whole four headed penis thing going. And to avoid confusion, I don’t mean a penis with a forehead. That’s just normal. I mean that in its flaccid state, the male echidna’s penis looks a bit like how they might grow craisins.

It looks like what happens when you ask a witch to bring a fart to life. For some time, This four-headedness Was a bit of a mystery. Seeing as the female’s bits would only require two. And that’s when one scientist decided to do the obvious and just ask. Turns out echidnas can’t talk. So…. real s*** scientist, by the way.

Anyway, another science hippie decided to take a closer look. It turns out when the echidna penis is erect, it looks like a punk snail singing opera. but you can see here that only two of the four tips become erect and the whole thing rotates a bit. So functionally, it becomes a two headed penis, just right for the female counterparts.

And these alternate. One pair becomes erect and ejaculates, and then the other. It’s sort of like… it’ll come to me. (Kill me.) Now, this double barreled shot-dong seems to be controlled by blood flow from a single vein that splits into two right before the tips. Anyway, back to the alley where the pair are now smoking a cigarette and Jacko’s sperm is rushing on its way to Charlotte’s uteruses.

Echidna sperm, it turns out, are sort of into carpooling. They twist together in these bundles that end up moving faster than an individual sperm would. It’s smart. It’s what happens when you put your heads together. Get it? When they go, it looks a bit like a shuttlecock. And quite frankly, this is what that word should mean. (I’m on fire.

So one of these sperms here eventually makes it to an egg and gets Charlotte all pregnant. And that brings us back to Oliver here. He doesn’t look like much at this point, but probably a welcome respite from what you’ve been looking at for the past few minutes. Over the next 20 or so days, this little embryo has to build itself a body.

And I’m sure you’re familiar with this whole development process, but we’ll have a little refresher. First, it sort of flattens out and then goes all pinchy, pinchy, before transforming into a slightly toothed vagina. Then onto a Salvador Dali impression of SpongeBob before hitting the crucial stage of two squirrels humping.

from here, as you know, it picks up a bit. Next, we have a goblin fondly admiring his new pet baby dragon into- Oh how sad, the dragon flew away. Plus major side boob. But then, Oliver seems to take a keen interest into a certain part of his body, if you know what I mean. No, you don’t. Because, look, it was just a hand grenade wrapped in tissue paper, you pervert.

And now he’s onto you with your dirty mind. Look at that side eye. Then, to… well, it’s still a side eye. But he’s getting sleepy. Then he falls asleep and dreams that his bellybutton has become a fist. Now, at this point, if you get a close up on your face, sure, you might think that’s a butthole of a sleeping ghost bear.

Or maybe a gummy bear that’s thinking “You got me out of a bag just to give me a kiss, didn’t you?” The horror. But pay attention now, when it turns into a zombie testicle with a five head, you can see something interesting start to emerge. Right there. A little tooth. And if you look at the Snout (Charizard), you can see it better.

This little temporary tooth is very important because it will help the little baby break out of this. Look at that. Charlotte laid an egg and she put it in her pouch. Her pouch, by the way, is also temporary, forming just before breeding season. Like if your bellybutton only opened up when it wanted a grape.

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You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. Give it a look today. Brilliant has been a long time sponsor of this show and I’m a fan. Where were we? Oh, right. This egg is not hard like the egg of a byeard. Instead it’s made of a tapestry of keratin-like fibers and is soft and leathery, which is more like the eggs of some reptiles.

And when it’s time to bust out, it’s handy to have that little tooth. And there he is for the first time in the open air. Little baby Oliver. Now, not all echidnas are born into the smooth, outstretched fingers of a man’s hand. We should all be so lucky. No, most of them hatch into what looks like the unkempt navel of a construction worker during a midsummer’s heat wave.

It is, in this environment, somewhat reminiscent of pornography in the 1960s that Oliver must search for his first meal. Now you should know that what Oliver is looking for, well more like smelling for, is called a milk patch. It’s sort of what you might get if you tried to buy a discount nipple in the gas station parking lot.

Just sort of skin that leaks. And you can’t return it. Oh, sorry. Didn’t know you wanted a fancy nipple with a tip on it. It costs extra. So whatever childhood you had, I bet you weren’t desperately holding onto pubic hair, the diameter of your thumb lapping at whatever oozed out some proto-nipple.

God forbid you let go. Let’s just say that pouch doesn’t exactly have a ziploc on it. You know what you need right there is a good sphincter. Keep the baby in. You can find those in the plumbing out of Home Depot. Soon Oliver’s head is reduced to a point with a single eye. What is he throwing up? Oh, that’s the back end.

All right. And so… I see this part’s the front. I mean, it’s not that different. Anyway. Not knowing much else, Oliver stays in that pouch for quite some time. Maybe too long. It’s just my opinion. But by the end, he sticks out. like when you try and stuff a winter hat into the back pocket of your jeans.

I mean, that’s a life lesson right there. Some holes are nice for a while, but then you got to move on. Now, you’ve probably heard them called all sorts of things. A hamster dressed up as an elephant, a tardigrade with Botox lips or even sentient scrotum, which is downright offensive. But these Beanie Babies made from leftover elbow skin are called puggles. Get it right.

And don’t try this at home either. These are professional science hippies trained in rearing puggles because once in a while they do fall out that air quotes pouch. At this stage, these puggles aren’t exactly heavy on the defense butt- Sorry. Heavy on the defense, but- You can start to see a 5:00 shadow form on their bodies.

At this stage, these puggles are basically dumplings of the meadow and spend most of their time hiding out in burrows with their mummy. Before they venture out into the world, they need to grow a spine. Well, a whole bunch of them, really. Get it? And that’s what they do. The spines first come in as little bitty things, but before long they look like a field of No. 2 pencils right before the harvest.

Only after the spines have started to come in do echidnas develop little hairs in between them, hairs with an inferiority complex. “No, your job is just as important.” Oh, boy. By adolescence, echidnas look a bit like a militarized whoopee cushion. When they walk around, the spines can lay flat-ish, but if they get their curve on, it gets all pointy pointy.

Much of the body of the echidna has this sheath of muscle just under the skin called the Panniculus carnosus. Flexing this muscle can move the spines and even point them in a particular direction. And they might do this to get some ventilation or to get some grippage down in a tunnel, or, of course, for defense.

Echidnas, if you haven’t noticed, don’t exactly excel in the running department. So under threat what they’ll often do is wedge themselves into a tight space or dig down a little and ball up, like Oliver here. I didn’t forget. Now, you might be a bit sour on that bird there picking on poor Oliver, but this is one of those “Don’t judge a book by its cover” situations.

You know why? Because Oliver decided to hunker down right next to a nest. And I get it. You don’t want a pincushion next to the crib. Not to mention the aesthetics. You got a Southwest Cactus thing going on right in the middle of a grassy front lawn. No wonder they pissed. But it doesn’t matter. That male bird can’t do s*** against spiky spiky.

And, you know, mommy bird;s giving them the what for. “Oh. Sure. ‘Don’t get worked up, honey.’ he says. ‘I’ll get rid of it.’ Bulls***. I swear if I have to pee in the middle of the night… and come back and sit on that thing by accident… Can’t do anything right.

” Now with a defense like that, you might expect that echidnas would be pretty good at digging, and you wouldn’t be wrong. They’ve got some good equipment too. Curved claws on their front feet and some excellent technique. More of an off to the side scoop. You don’t get dirt on your nethers like a dog do. In fact, their whole body plan is a bit splayed out to the sides, like an alligator, for example, and their pelvic girdle, which is what connects your top half to your bottom half, is more similar to a reptile than to other mammals.

 And this arrangement can make it look like the echidna’s feet are put on backwards. Lots of weird stuff. They also have a low body temperature and these sorts of oddities and reptilian similarities lead some people to calling echidnas primitive. Echidnas are monotremes, a group of mammals that took a different turn from the rest of us about 160 million years ago.

You know, like how rock, hip hop, soul and jazz all split off from the blues. Well, Monotremes are like the jazz of mammalian evolution. Look at the echidna’s closest living relative. The platypus is like Coltrane playing the song Rubber Ducky. But they’ve been evolving just as long as the rest of us just doing it different.

 Sure, the backward feet can look a bit strange until you have to scratch your ass. They’re perfect for it. Now who’s primitive? Echidnas can also use those snouts to dig, and that’s because that thing is solid, made out of their face bones. I mean, from the top, the skull looks like a bicycle seat just right for a naked man.

Now you’re thinking about it, aren’t you? From the side, you can see it has a subtle curve to it. Well, they can use that thing like it’s a pointy plow, but not like some ordinary gardening tool. It’s fancy. The thing’s like a metal detector but for ants and termites. They’ve got these receptors on their snouts that can sense small changes in electrical fields.

And listen, if you’re an ant or a termite and get found out, you’re going to get the tongue. It’s a long one too. Chase you right down a hole. You French kiss an echidna, you don’t need a bidet. The tongue is covered in a sticky mucus that holds insects to the back of the mouth. There they have two abrasive grinding surfaces, one at the base of the tongue and the other on the roof of the mouth.

So when the echidna eats, it sounds like this. Anyway, back to Oliver. Now that he’s grown, Oliver will lead a fairly solitary life. But come on, what more do you want than some ants to eat, some birds to f*** with and maybe a swim now and again. The exception is when Oliver gets horny.

In breeding season, the females emit some stank that drives the males crazy. Male echidnas as well as platypuses have these little spurs on their back feet. The Spurs are equipped with a venom gland. Platypuses use them to kick the crap out of each other during breeding season. Echidnas not so much. Their spurs no longer stand up straight.

And what used to be venom is now more of a benign, waxy, syphilitic drip, the scent of which apparently still has a role in mating. And instead of stabbing each other, they have a civilized approach. They queue up. Males will follow a female around in these trains that can get up to ten males deep. It’s like the polite Canadian version of the Human Centipede.

I don’t even know what that means. And this goes on for quite some time. It can be weeks before the female’s ready to mate, and even then she’s only going to choose one or maybe a couple to mate with.  A young echidna like Oliver doesn’t stand a chance and he knows it. Went home from the club early.

Going to have an Oliver night tonight, maybe break out the watercolor set or masturbate. Probably looks like the fountains of Bellagio.

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credit to Ze Frank