Hot Damn! It's the Duckbill Platypus Genome Project!

How is the platypus a favourite with creationists? Do they like the idea of a mammal that lays eggs? How about one with a mammary area instead of nipples? What do they find appealing about the lack of vagina?

As a platypus of long standing (check the domain) I think this is great news! :)

To answer your question, pough, it seems that the platypus is a favorite political football among creationists because it seems that earlier ancestors of the platypus (e.g. obdurodon) were actually quite a bit larger. The argument, which I trip over quite often when I'm googling for platypus info but rarely bother to examine in detail, seems to be that bigger is better, that getting smaller represents a form of devolution, and that such an outcome contradicts some strawman form of evolution in which development is always "forward" or "upward" or something. It's a silly argument, refuting creationism as much as evolution, but I guess we're not dealing with logical people here.

That's interesting and also new to me. Never really looked that close except to say that googling the poor animal gets a lot of creationism related hits. I always assumed it had something to do with it's unusual physical characteristics, which ironically is likely the same reason why it was chosen for a genome project.

Big ups if they get good sequence of the chain of sex chromosomes. This will really help with our understanding of mammalian evolution.

You can find a list of all eukaryote sequencing projects at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/leuks.cgi

part of it can also be seen in the ENSEMBL genome browser
http://www.ensembl.org/index.html