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  2. Philippines Rat Returns From Century of Being Extinct

Philippines Rat Returns From Century of Being Extinct

By gregladen on April 28, 2008.

i-5e21ade907be46a25ce58260f0e85ae4-Philippines_rat.jpgIt is always nice when an extinct animal shows up and announces that rumors of its extinction were exaggerated. In this case, we have the dwarf cloud rat just discovered by an international research team.

Lawrence Heaney, team leader and curator at the Chicago-based Field Museum of Natural History, said the rare dwarf cloud rat was last seen by British scientists some 112 years ago.

He said the rat was dead when the team found it in a canopy of a large tree whose branches were covered by thick moss, orchids and ferns at a national park in Mount Pulag in northern Luzon, the Philippine Daily Inquirer said.

The animal was described as small "with reddish brown fur, a black mask around its large dark eyes, small round ears, a broad and blunt snout and a long tail covered with dark hair," the report said.

"It is the animal whose existence had baffled biologists for so many years," Heaney said.

The animal has been preserved and is being prepared for shipment to Chicago for further studies....

[source]

Tags
nature conservation
Rodent

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I've been a bit quiet over the past few days - primarily due to a writing deadline that I need to hit. (Who says academics have the summer off!) While today would look like an ideal day to get some blogging done, instead I'm just going to kick back and celebrate my birthday with family.

Seamus Heaney turns 70

Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner is 70 today. To celebrate here is his poem "Strange Fruit," one of a series of poems about bog-bodies. Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd. Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.

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I hate science press releases.

Lawrence Heaney has done more for threatened species in the Philippines (a conservation Hot Spot) than anyone else, but only because the larger animals were wiped out long ago - on my island, wild boars have disappeared altogether within the last 10 years.

Long may he celebrate his new-found rat - if he'd asked me, I could have shot the bugger that ran down my bedroom curtain at about 9:47 last night.

regards

Richard