Fauna of Australia species are nocturnal and many arboreal. Two of the five living species of monotreme occur in Australia: the platypus and the short-beaked echidna. The monotremes differ from other mammals in their methods of reproduction; in particular, they lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young. The platypus—a venomous, egg-laying, duck-billed amphibious mammal—is considered to be one of the strangest creatures in the animal kingdom. When it was first presented by Joseph Banks to English naturalists it was thought to be so strange that it was a cleverly created hoax. The short-beaked echidna is similarly strange, covered in hairy spikes
Mammal destruction]], though there are efforts to combat this. [[File:Mammal species pie chart.svg|thumb|upright=1.35|The orders [[Rodent]]ia (blue), [[Chiroptera]] (red) and [[Soricomorpha]] (yellow) together make up over 70% of mammal species. Mammal classification has been through several iterations since [[Carl Linnaeus]] initially defined the class. No classification system is universally accepted; McKenna & Bell (1997) and Wilson & Reader (2005) provide useful recent compendiums. [[George Gaylord Simpson]]'s "Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals" (AMNH "Bulletin" v. 85, 1945) provides [[systematics]] of mammal origins and relationships that were universally taught until the end of the 20th century. Since Simpson's classification, the [[fossil