Person
Caldwell, William Hay (1859 - 1941)
- Born
- 1859
- Died
- 28 August 1941
- Occupation
- Zoologist
Summary
William Caldwell was a Scottish zoologist who travelled to Australia in 1884 to investigate whether platypus laid eggs. "With the assistance of the local Aboriginals, Caldwell set up camp on the banks of the Burnett River in northern Queensland, hunting for lungfish, echidna, and platypus eggs.[3] After extensive searching assisted by a team of 150 Aboriginals, he discovered a few eggs. Mindful of the high cost per word, Caldwell tersely and now famously wired the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Montreal: "Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic". That is, monotremes lay eggs, and the eggs are similar to those of reptiles in that only part of the egg divides as it develops." [William Hay Caldwell, Wikipedia, 2025-04-04]
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Published resources
Books
- MacInnis, Peter, Curious Minds: the Discoveries of Australian Naturalists (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2012), 213 pp. Pages 178-187. Details
- Moyal, Ann, Platypus: the Extraordinary Story of How a Curious Creature Baffled the World (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001), 240 pp. Details
- Moyal, Ann, Platypus (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 249 pp. Details
Book Sections
- Robin, Libby, 'The Platypus Frontier: Eggs, Aborigines and Empire in nineteenth-century Queensland' in Dislocating the frontier: essaying the mystique of the Australian outback, Deborah Rose and Richard Davis, eds (Canberra: ANU Press, 2005), pp. 99-120. Details
Journal Articles
- Grant, T.R.; and Templesmith, P.D., 'Field Biology of the Platypus (Ornithorhynchus Anatinus) - Historical and Current Perspectives', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B - Biological Sciences, 353 (1372) (1998), 1081-1091. Details
- Gruber, Jacob W., 'Does the Platypus Lay Eggs? The History of an Event in Science', Archives of Natural History, 18 (1) (1991), 51-123. Details
- Robin, Libby, 'Paradox on the Queensland Frontier: Platypus, Lungfish and Other Vagaries of 19th Century Science', Australian Humanities Review (2000). http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-September-2000/robin1.html. Details
Gavan McCarthy
Created: 4 April 2025