echidna

New conversation spawned on monotreme. Apparently the long-beaked echidna is native to New Guinea, making false the OED's statement that all echidnas are Australian (right on, Weirdnet!).... But glad to have found this page again!

P.S. See here.

Two tails?! That's nothing. The male echidna has, they tell me, a four-headed penis. Even the Greeks didn't think of that.

And yes, a "damn cute little spiky critter" is by far the best definition.

You're on fire, qroqqa. Righteous etymology!

Echidna is the Greek for "adder, viper". An echidna looks like a hedgehog, not like an adder. Consult a middling-sized Classical Greek dictionary and look up echidna, and run your finger down one further. You will find echinos "hedgehog".

Now for the cover-up. They (the Zoologists' Cabal) then renamed the echidna genera Tachyglossus and Zaglossus, from tachy- "fast", gloss- "tongue", and za- "my, what a"; thus doing the nomenclatural equivalent of looking round with shifty eyes then pointing at its tongue, saying, "Nah, nah, see, when it sticks its tongue out like that to lick up ants, it looks amazingly like an adder sticking its, er, tongue out to, er, smell the air. It does."

I once wrote to Stephen Jay Gould about this, and even broke out into green biro at the crucial point. But did I get any acknowledgement for my pioneering work? Not a sausage.

In Greek mythology, Echidna was a female demon who was referred to as the Mother of all Monsters. She is accredited with mothering virtually every major monster in Greek mythology. She is depicted as having the face and torso of a beautiful woman, sometimes would have wings, and would always have the body of a serpent. Sometimes, she would be depicted as having two tails.
(from Mystical Creature A Day)

OR: In Greek mythology, a half-woman and half-snake, the mother of various monsters.

According to the OED:
A genus of Australian toothless burrowing monotremate mammals (family Echidnidæ), resembling hedgehogs in size and external appearance. In several points their structure is allied to that of birds. The best known species is E. Hystrix, the Porcupine Ant-eater.

According to me:
A damn cute little spiky critter.