This furry beastie from the Philippines is hot news for evolutionary biology. Its discovery was announced last week by Lawrence Heaney from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Heaney and his teammates, from the Utah Museum of Natural History, the Philippine National Museum and conservation groups, discovered the rodent last month on the island of Luzon. It has bright orange fur and whiskers five times as long as its head is wide.
Although Heaney鈥檚 team finds a few new species of rodent each year, this one breaks the mould. All the other rodents on Luzon spend their lives rooting around on the ground for food and can be traced back to just two ancestral species. The new rodent is unrelated to either group, and prefers the vines of the lowland forest. That suggests scientists need to add a chapter to the evolutionary history of the island.
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Rob Voss from the American Museum of Natural History in New York says early evolutionary studies focused on the large and exciting mammals, but small ones are turning out to be far more diverse.