A Freakishly Large New Species of Rat Has Been Discovered in the Solomon Islands
Source: Gizmodo
A Freakishly Large New Species of Rat Has Been Discovered in the Solomon Islands
Jake Buehler
Today 12:00am Filed to: BIG OL' RAT
The Solomon Islands—a nation comprised of nearly one thousand islands located northeast of Australia, between Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea—is an impressive corner of the globe. Dense, lush rainforest blankets the majority of the islands, and the country’s coral reef biodiversity is among the richest in the world. Many of the plants and animals in the Solomon Islands have evolved in splendid isolation, and now, one of these animals has emerged from its idyllic surroundings, revealing itself to science for the first time: the vika (Uromys vika), a big-ass rat four times the size of even the heftiest of the familiar, city-slicker variety.
What, you were expecting a gorgeous tropical bird or something?
Described in a newly-published paper in the Journal of Mammalogy by researchers at Chicago’s Field Museum and the Solomon Islands’ Zaira Resource Management Area, the vika is a sight to behold. Including the scaly tail, the deep brown, robust rodent can be a foot and a half long, and can weigh as much as a pineapple. The vika, like its closest relatives, is an avid climber and likely spends most of its time high in the trees of the rainforest, clambering around in the middle of the night much like a possum. This new species can be distinguished from other Uromys species—many of which are also found in the Solomon Islands—by measurable differences in skull shape and by its genes. So far, the vika is only known from the island it was discovered upon, Vangunu.
While Uromys vika is “new” in the formal, scholastic sense, the animal was already a part of the traditional knowledge of Vangunu’s residents. It was familiar to many people on the island as a beefy rat that liked to devour green coconuts, boring into them with its rugged incisors. Some of the earliest recorded accounts of the vika from locals include notes that it was supposedly common on some of the small, former plantation islands just offshore Vangunu. The vika’s introduction to the scientific community came after years of searching, after lead study author Tyrone Lavery heard descriptions of the rat from Vangunu locals back in 2010. After much time and effort attempting to find the giant rat in Vangunu’s rainforest, a single specimen was eventually found scrambling out of a felled tree. The observation and collection of a physical specimen was the final piece of the puzzle.
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Read more: https://gizmodo.com/a-freakishly-large-new-species-of-rat-has-been-discover-1818804727
This is an illustration of the new species, Uromys vika. Image: Velizar Simeonovski, The Field Museum
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