A vaudeville comedian who married science with showmanship, Harry Burrell built a portable "platypusary" to keep the notoriously elusive animal alive in captivity, getting stabbed by poisonous spurs along the way. His underwater tank produced the first known footage of a platypus swimming, proving it navigates by touch alone.

— via The Conversation — History, Meg Foster, Chancellor's Research Fellow, School of Communication and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney