VERIFIED FACT
Platypus fur glows blue-green under ultraviolet light.
Why this sounds fake
Mammal fur seems dull and ordinary under normal light, not capable of giving off a blue-green fluorescent glow.
A platypus already feels like a biological prank, and then the fur does this. Researchers exposed preserved platypus specimens to ultraviolet light and found that the fur absorbed the UV and re-emitted visible blue-green light. That process is biofluorescence, not glow-in-the-dark light produced from nothing. The finding does not yet prove exactly what the glow does in living platypuses, and camouflage is one possible idea. The publishable surprise is narrower and solid: one of the world's strangest mammals has fur that can fluoresce in a color humans normally would never see.
1 discovery explored