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The trend for extinct or thought-to-be-lost creatures might be to revive them, but it’s undeniably cooler to actually prove that they still exist. And the rediscovered giant woolly rat is a creature that’s as glorious as it is natural.
In a paper published in April in Mammalia, Czech researcher František Vejmělka shares the first-ever photographs of Mallmys istapantapor the subalpine woolly rat—an elusive creature that has existed in scientific limbo for decades. Its 1989 registration to the animal repository was purely based on archival data and skull collections in museums.
No one had actually collected photographic or visual data to prove the creature’s existence beyond historical records, leading researchers to wonder whether it still exists in the wild. As Vejmělka found, the woolly rat is still very much alive in its natural habitat in New Guinea.
“It’s astonishing that such a large and striking animal has remained so poorly studied—despite its size and how really amazing this animal is, there were no pictures of it,” Vejmělka told The Times in June.
A wild discovery
This was extremely difficult to come by, Vejmělka admitted in a release, adding that “If it weren’t for the indigenous hunters who accompanied me in the mountains and helped me locate the animals, I would never have been able to collect this data.”
Indeed, the woolly rat resided deep within the rainforests of Mount Wilhelm, a nearly 15,000-foot-high (4,509 meters) mountain with little to no hiking tracks. The area was also home to several indigenous (human) tribes who were understandably wary about uninvited visitors.
Eventually, he and his team were able to form a collaboration with local hunters, who allowed Vejmělka to join their night hunts. It was during one of these hunts that Vejmělka was able to identify and capture the rodent, which the locals called mosak, or “man-biter.”
Got to see it to believe it
The paper presents the first-ever data on the woolly rat’s diet, behavioral patterns, and general aspects of its lifestyle. Specifically, the woolly rats are nearly 3 feet (85 centimeters) long and weigh almost 5 pounds (2 kilograms). It is nocturnal, climbing trees at night to nibble on plants using its sharp claws. In addition to documenting the rat, the team also collected data on 61 species of non-flying mammals native to the region.
But the encounter also revealed some discrepancies between museum collections and the rats’ actual populations. The rat’s purported “rarity” appears to be connected “only to the remoteness of the habitats it occupies,” Vejmělka wrote in the paper, adding that the “reliability with which we detected the species locally questions their rarity in nature compared to scientific collections.”
Simply, field expeditions are truly critical; the more we doubt the persistence of a certain species—not just for this particular rat, he said, adding, “How much more is there to discover about the biodiversity of tropical mountains?”
