'Extinct' rodent turns up alive and well
Monday, 13 March 2006
A team of US, French and Chinese researchers compared the live animal's skeleton to the fossils of a family of rodents that lived in Asia in the early Oligocene to late Miocene eras.
They confirm, in the latest issue of the journal Science, that it belonged to the same mammalian family.
When the animal was discovered, it made the headlines as biologists thought it belonged to a new family of animals, rather than just a new species of an existing family.
They named it Laonastes aenigmamus, or Laotian rock rat.
In fact it belongs to the family Diatomyidae and resembles a small squirrel but is not a rat, says palaeontologist Dr Mary Dawson, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Diatomyidae lived during the middle Tertiary period, 34 to 11 million years ago, in southern Asia, central China and Japan.
They were medium sized rodents and had characteristic molar teeth and jaw structure.
The researchers say the rodent is an example of the 'Lazarus effect', when an organism suddenly reappears after a long gap in the fossil record.
Finding an animal thought to be extinct is even more exciting than discovering a new species, says Dr George Schaller, the Wildlife Conservation Society biologist who stumbled across the new animal last year.
The rodent is a nocturnal mammal that inhabits a remote Laotian jungle, and is known to local ethnic groups who call it kha-nyou.
Scientist have been unable so far to see a live specimen. The only one found had been killed by hunters and was put on sale at a local market where it was spotted by conservation society researchers.