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Amazing Creations That Praise Their Creator

WHAT IS IT?

WHATEVER IT IS, it seems as though it was drawn from a grab bag. A beak like a duck’s, a tail like a beaver’s, a rear vent like a reptile’s, webbed feet and fur like an otter’s. Lays eggs like a bird, suckles its young like a mammal. Leg spurs like a rooster’s, which inject poison like the fangs of a pit viper. The size of a rabbit, yet eats like a horse: 1,200 earthworms, 50 crayfish, plus tadpoles, grubs, and beetles​—all of this every 24 hours! So bizarre an animal that when its skin first appeared in London two centuries ago, some people dismissed it as a fake. But it’s no fake. It lives in Australia. It’s a platypus.

If you believe in a Creator-Designer, you have no problem. But if you believe in evolution, you have one. Evolutionists can’t help you. One source says: “We have no hard evidence to indicate which fossil reptiles were their ancestors. Our knowledge of many of the candidates is based to a considerable degree on teeth.” But teeth are no help​—the platypus has no teeth. “Nor is there any fossil evidence of any consequence about their ancestors. So we have virtually nothing to help us link these creatures to any group of fossil reptiles.”

With nothing to link the platypus with reptiles, how can it be said that it was once a reptile that is now becoming a mammal? Perhaps it’s a mammal becoming a bird? Or a bird becoming a reptile? Since no one knows where it’s from or where it’s going, perhaps it’s just as it has always been​—the platypus it was designed to be by its Creator, Jehovah.

Why Penguins’ Feet Don’t Freeze

THEY ARE CONSTANTLY on snow or ice or in ice water. Their feet get close to freezing without freezing. If warm blood was pumped into them, it would return to the body chilled. Soon the heat loss through the feet would be so great that not only the feet but the whole penguin would freeze. So an ingenious heat-exchange mechanism solves the problem. The arteries entering the feet are surrounded by veins leaving the feet. Thus the cold blood leaving the feet via these veins takes up heat from the warm blood descending in the arteries. The arterial blood thus cooled is adequate for feet that have lots of tendons but few muscles​—cold tendons can function adequately whereas chilled muscles cannot. By means of this ingenious heat exchange, the penguin’s body is kept warm and its feet do not freeze.

Two Kinds of Hibernation, Both Amazing

HIBERNATION IS AN amazing feat. The number of true hibernating mammals is relatively small​—notably dormice, ground squirrels, marmots (including woodchucks). The tiny, 13-lined ground squirrel’s temperature plummets until only a few degrees above the cold outside. Its breathing drops from several hundred times a minute to one in five minutes. Its heartbeat goes from several hundred a minute to one or two a minute. It moves only slightly every few hours, yet muscles retain their tone. Digestive and excretory systems continue to work.

Bears are not true hibernators (neither are chipmunks). The body temperature of bears remains near normal. They burn an estimated 4,000 food calories a day. They awaken and move about frequently. Yet they exist for three months or more without food or water. During all that time they neither defecate nor urinate. This means that the nitrogenous wastes, usually eliminated through the urine, accumulate and seemingly would cause uremic poisoning. But they don’t.

The bear solves its nitrogenous waste-disposal problem by a form of recycling. The New Scientist magazine of February 21, 1985, explains: “The scientists’ interpretation is that the hibernating bear diverts nitrogen from pathways that synthesise urea into pathways that generate amino acids and new proteins. And it does that by using glycerol [produced when fats are metabolized] and recycled nitrogen as the building blocks.”

They Communicate Before They Are Born

WHILE STILL IN THE SHELL, some baby birds announce their imminent arrival. They make small peeping sounds. Baby quail do this. Domestic chicks also. After a goose has heard peeping calls, she “begins to communicate with her offspring . . . She utters faint contact calls to the goslings in their eggs, and the latter are capable of producing a number of different calls, which indicate to the mother whether they are developing normally. When the offspring produce a plaintive call, known as ‘lost piping,’ the mother responds with contact calls as if to comfort them, to which the unborn goslings sometimes respond in their turn with greeting calls.” Just before the goslings hatch, the gander will take up a position by the nest, possibly alerted by these “conversations.”

[Picture on page 21]

Peep Peep