- Joined
- Oct 20, 2000
- Messages
- 4,453
This article should interest all you Rat lovers!
By James Gorman
RODENTS, as well as scientists, stand on the shoulders of giants. For the rodents, however, it is size and weight that make a giant, not farseeing intellect. One particular giant outweighs them all.
Until recently the creature was known by teeth alone, which made size estimates a bit shaky. But paleontologists are reporting the discovery of a nearly complete skeleton of Phoberomys pattersoni, a distant relative of the guinea pig, that they can now confirm weighed about 680kg. The eight-million-year-old skeleton was excavated in Venezuela three years ago.
The name can be translated as Pattersons fearful mouse, but Phoberomys cannot have been afraid of much. Nor did it look like a mouse. A drawing based on fossil evidence, being published in Science, looks for all the world like a cross between a beaver and a hippopotamus.
Upper and lower pairs of ever-growing incisors are what make Phoberomys a rodent, but it is, fortunately, nothing like the enormous rats sometimes reported in subways and other urban settings. Its nearest living relative is the pacarana, a 15kg (30-pound) nocturnal herbivore that feeds on the slopes of the Andes. - New York Times.
By James Gorman
RODENTS, as well as scientists, stand on the shoulders of giants. For the rodents, however, it is size and weight that make a giant, not farseeing intellect. One particular giant outweighs them all.
Until recently the creature was known by teeth alone, which made size estimates a bit shaky. But paleontologists are reporting the discovery of a nearly complete skeleton of Phoberomys pattersoni, a distant relative of the guinea pig, that they can now confirm weighed about 680kg. The eight-million-year-old skeleton was excavated in Venezuela three years ago.
The name can be translated as Pattersons fearful mouse, but Phoberomys cannot have been afraid of much. Nor did it look like a mouse. A drawing based on fossil evidence, being published in Science, looks for all the world like a cross between a beaver and a hippopotamus.
Upper and lower pairs of ever-growing incisors are what make Phoberomys a rodent, but it is, fortunately, nothing like the enormous rats sometimes reported in subways and other urban settings. Its nearest living relative is the pacarana, a 15kg (30-pound) nocturnal herbivore that feeds on the slopes of the Andes. - New York Times.
