Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Monotreme
/ˈmɒnətriːm/noun
An egg-laying mammal, comprising the platypus and the echidnas.
The Greek roots
μόνος
mónos
single, alone
τρῆμα
trêma
hole, perforation
Literally: “single hole”
The story of the word
The platypus and the echidnas have one opening for urine, faeces and eggs, and early nineteenth-century anatomists named the group for precisely that plumbing: μόνος plus τρῆμα. Nothing in the name mentions the far stranger fact, that these are mammals which lay eggs and then sweat milk through the skin. τρῆμα reappears in trematode, the parasitic flukes, named for the sucker they hold on with.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1830s
Same family
monopolymonotonetrematodemonk
In a sentence
Only five monotreme species are alive today, all of them in Australia and New Guinea.
A monotreme egg is leathery rather than brittle.