Link between mammal, reptile, and bird

Check out this long beaked echidna! A very cool article on this wonderful animal just came out in the New York TImes. I had never heard of such a creature. It is a cousin to the platypus and has a fantastically large brain. (No wonder it avoids all human contact. It probably would have been hunted out of existence.) There is also a link to the very first field study on this animal in the Journal of Mammalogy.
Here are a couple of cool picks from the New York Times.