China was breeding huge rats to eat before they were banned due to coronavirus. Called “bamboo rats,” the Chinese believe that eating bamboo rat meat makes them prettier and can detoxify their bodies. Until recently, bamboo rats were a celebrated food in China. Farmers had about 25 million of the rats before the government banned […]
Tag: rat
Fat Sand Rat – Near Jubail
I went to an area near Jubail in mid-June where Fat Sand Rat Psammomys obesus had been seen before as I have not seen them before. I had been there previously but failed to see them so this time left at 03:00 to get to the site by first light. This time it paid off […]
Giant tree-dwelling rat discovered in the Solomon Islands
For a long time, people living on the Vangunu Island in the Solomons spoke about the “vika”, a giant rat on the island that lives in trees and cracks open coconuts with its teeth. But the rat remained elusive to the scientific community. Now, researchers have finally discovered an individual of the mysterious rat, making […]
New species of ‘hog-nosed’ rat discovered in Indonesia
Victorian scientists have discovered a new mammal, the hog-nosed rat, with features not been seen by science before. Hyorhinomys stuempkei was previously undocumented in any scientific collection. The rodent was found by a team of scientists from Museum Victoria, Louisiana State University and the Dutch Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense in a remote, mountainous forest of Mount […]
In the shadows of Machu Picchu, scientists find ‘extinct’ cat-sized mammal
Below one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world, scientists have made a remarkable discovery: a living cat-sized mammal that, until now, was only known from fossils. The Machu Picchu arboreal chinchilla rat (Cuscomys oblativa) was first described from two enigmatic skulls discovered in Incan pottery sculpted 400 years ago. Dug up by […]
Local knowledge sheds light on some of the world’s strangest mammals
One of the difficulties of studying rare and endangered species is that they are, by definition, hard to find. Scientists attempting to understand their distributions and the threats to their survival can spend hundreds of hours in the field while collecting little data, simply because sightings are so few and far between. To find out […]
Gigantic Rats Will Rule the Earth When Other Animals Go Extinct
University of Leicester academic predicts rats will continue to grow and fill a ‘significant chunk’ of Earth’s emptying ecospace. When Reggae band UB40 famously asked, ‘There’s a rat in my kitchen what am I going to do?” in their 1986 hit single, they were looking for a practical solution to rid them of a pesky […]