American zoologists managed to find the first real traces of a giant rat on the Solomon Islands, which was considered almost mythical. This rodent is able to compete in size with small breeds of dogs and cats, according to an article published in the Journal of Mammology.
“The new species of mammals is a truly amazing creature - it's a huge, just a giant rat. This is the first species of rat discovered in the last 80 years in the Solomon Islands, for traces of which scientists have been searching unsuccessfully all this time,”says Tyrone Lavery of the Field Museum of Chicago (USA).
The first travelers to the tropical islands of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean often recounted in their memories that unusually large and aggressive rats and other rodents live on these pieces of land, resembling cats and dogs in size, and not their relatives from Europe.
Most of these "mega rats", as scientists say, became extinct after civilization came to the islands and with its unchanging attributes - massive felling of trees, dogs and other domestic animals capable of catching and eating rodents. According to the calculations of geneticists, in the first two centuries of colonization of America alone, Europeans destroyed two dozen species of such rats.
In the Solomon Islands, according to Lavery, for a long time there has been a legend about giant rats leading a secretive lifestyle and reaching truly record sizes - according to the stories of local residents, up to 50 centimeters in length. Scientists have been trying for more than 80 years to find "wick", as the aborigines call the rat, but so far they have not been able to find this mythical creature.
According to the zoologist, he himself took part in a fruitless search, and recently began to doubt that this species really exists, and was inclined to think that the locals considered ordinary black rats a separate species and attributed unusual properties to them.
Soon after, he was lucky. Walking through the forest, the scientist saw a rat crawling out from under a recently felled tree. Its unusually large size and unique structure of the skull immediately suggested to the zoologist that he was dealing with a new species of mammals.
This rat, named Uromys vika, really turned out to be a very large rodent - about a kilogram in weight and about 45 centimeters in length. Such large sizes, as scientists suggest, may be due to the unusual diet of this no longer mythical creature - the rat feeds on coconuts, gnawing the shell and eating the flesh.
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The difficulties with finding a rat, as Lavery explains, are associated with the fact that it does not live on the ground, like almost all other rats, but on the branches of trees and very rarely goes down. According to the scientist, her ancestors came to the Solomon Islands in the same way as many other "mega rats" - by improvised "rafting", traveling on tree trunks thrown into the sea by the rivers of Asia or Australia.
Like many other inhabitants of the tropical islands, according to the zoologist, Uromys vika is likely to immediately fall into the Red Book as an endangered species, since its population is small, and deforestation is underway on Wangunu Island, where Lavery stumbled upon a mythical animal. Scientists hope that the authorities of the archipelago will soon take measures to protect this new species.