Belonging to a family of rodents, the Laotian rock rat was thought to have gone extinct 11 million years ago. But, a recent DNA analysis surprisingly reveals that the rat is actually a ‘living fossil!’
All these years, believed to be the only representative of an entirely new rodent family, the rare Asian species is actually a part of a family, which got completely separated from the rest of the more than 1,500 species of modern-day rodents not today or decades back, but about 44 million years ago, according to the new gene study.
Distinctively, the species has a black coat, a bushy tail, and a duck-like waddle, with its only closest living relative being the gundi. Gundi is a rodent spotted only in Africa, which is having a guinea pig-like body and a rat-like head.
Author Dorothee Huchon of Israel’s Tel Aviv University, who is leading the study said,
It’s not exactly a fossil. It hasn’t stopped evolving.
To read more on the rodent, visit this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.