The first comes to my attention not from the Merriam-Webster site (though the definition is from there) but from 9 Chickweed Lane, which has become one of my guilty comic pleasures:
cloaca - the common chamber into which the intestinal and urogenital tracts discharge especially in monotreme mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and elasmobranch fishes; also : a comparable chamber of an invertebrate
Apparently it is also a synonym for "sewer." (No, not a person who sews.)
Oh, and:
monotreme - any of an order (Monotremata) of egg-laying mammals comprising the platypuses and echidnas (from the Greek for one hole)
which of course brings us:
echidna - a spiny-coated toothless burrowing nocturnal monotreme mammal (Tachyglossus aculeatus) of Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea that has a long extensible tongue and long heavy claws and that feeds chiefly on ants; also : a related mammal (Zaglossus bruijni) of New Guinea having a longer snout and shorter spines
None of these is likely to make its way into my working vocabulary. And with apologies to any readers who may have encountered this before I had a chance to flesh it out.
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