The platypus is legendarily weird.

It looks a bit like a toothless beaver, but instead of a nose, it has what looks like a rubber flipper. It lays eggs like a duck; it lactates like a cow.

The male has venomous spurs on its back ankles. It lives a semiaquatic life in streams, rivers and ponds in Australia — the driest continent on Earth besides Antarctica.

Until recently, the platypus wasn’t something conservationists were much concerned about. Despite its peculiarity, it was common. But with indications that populations were declining, the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2016 updated the platypus’s conservation status to “near threatened.”