32.2 inches from nose to tail and weighing around three and a half pounds. That’s almost a yard long. 10 of those and you’ve almost got yourself a fist down.
The discovery was made by a team from the BBC Natural History Unit inside the crater of Mount Bosavi, which is an extinct volcano.
“This is one of the world’s largest rats. It’s a true rat, the same kind you find in the city sewers,” said Kristofer Helgen, a biologist from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. We at NaturalBuy.com have a question, though. Is it a technical requirement to be able to live in a city sewer to be a rat?
Rat’s are not all that they found there, however. George McGavin, a Research Associate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and The Department of Zoology of Oxford University, said about the area that “To find new species of insects in this region isn’t uncommon, but we found sixteen new frog species, one new bat species and at least three new fish, and this giant bloody rat — the size of a cat. Amazing!”
He continued, “The animals inside this crater were unafraid of humans, pretty much because they hadn’t seen them very much.” I’d be afraid if I were them. Once they discover you…it’s usually all downhill from there.
The crater is abandoned by humans because local inhabitants keep out of it. The climb in and out is too steep for their blood.
Summing up his trip, he gave some advice. “Humans can’t seem to agree on anything, but we should at least agree that forest habitats like this one should be conserved; not only because 80 percent of the world’s species live in forests, but if we are going to avoid the worst affects of global warming we’ve got to keep these forests,” McGavin said.
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