New Species: Giant Rat!

September 9th, 2009

Ok…so giant rats aren’t really that exciting. I just know people don’t like rats much, but this one seems more like Michael Jackson’s Ben than Williard’s rat Ben from the movie Willard, or the original Willard. A couple rats that had some sort of bioidentical hormone replacement austin.

A Smithsonian Institution biologist, working with the Natural History Unit of the BBC, has discovered a new species of giant rat on a film making expedition to a remote rainforest in New Guinea.

While this is interesting in that it is a new species, picturing the scene is just as fascinating. Not just the area where it was found, but how friendly it was.

The rat was discovered in the crater of an extinct volcano named Mount Bosavi in Papua New Guinea’s Southern Highlands province. This gigantic volcano’s crater is two and half miles wide and rimmed with walls nearly half a mile high, trapping the creatures inside a “lost world” of mountain rainforests probably rarely visited by humans.

Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and Muse Opiang, a biologist with the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research, were first on the scene when the rat was found by a tracker from the Kasua tribe that lives outside the crater.

Weighing nearly 3.5 pounds, and measuring 32 inches from nose to tail, the Bosavi woolly rat is one of the biggest rats in the world. Most surprising was that the rat was completely tame, a sign that animals in the isolated crater were unfamiliar with humans. “It is a true rat, closely related to the rats and mice most of us are familiar with, but so much bigger,” said Helgen.

giant-rat