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antipodi
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Thu Mar 16, 2006 8:41 am
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 Extinct Rodent Not so Extinct
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Extinct Rodent Not so Extinct
March 10, 2006 — A squirrel-like rodent found last year in Laos has been identified as belonging to a family of rodents thought to have died out 11 million years ago, scientists reported Friday in Science magazine.
A team of U.S., French and Chinese researchers compared the live animal's skeleton to the fossils of a family of rodents that lived in Asia in the early Oligocene to late Miocene eras, and confirmed it belonged to the same mammalian family.
When the animal was discovered, it made the headlines as biologists thought it belonged to a new family of animals, rather than just a new species of an existing family.
They named it Laonastes aenigmamus, or Laotian rock rat.
In fact, it belongs to the family of Diatomyidae and resembles a small squirrel but is not a rat, said paleontologist Mary Dawson, of the Carnegie Natural Museum in Pittsburgh, Penn.
Finding an animal thought to be extinct is even more exciting than discovering a new species, said George Schaller, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) biologist who stumbled across the new animal last year.
The rodent is a nocturnal mammal that inhabits a remote Laotian jungle, and is known to local ethnic groups who call it Kha-nyou.
Scientist have been unable so far to see a live Laonastes. The only one found had been killed by hunters and was put on sale at a local market where it was spotted by WCS researchers.
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