It smells like a rat. It looks a bit like a rat. And to the people of Laos the little furry creature on sale in the local market probably even tastes like a rat.
But scientists in the US revealed Thursday that the animal represents the first new family of mammal to be discovered for more than 30 years.
hunted for food
Named kha-nyou by local people, it lives in the forests and limestone outcrops of Laos, where it is hunted for food.
It was brought to the attention of the rest of the world by Robert Timmins, a British scientist who found two of the animals laid out on market tables in a small town in Laos.
"I took a look at them and realized they were something pretty exciting," Timmins said yesterday. "They were like nothing I had seen before."
He paid the equivalent of a few pence for the creatures, which he sent to the Natural History Museum in London for analysis.
Differences in the skull and bone structure and DNA tests showed the animal was definitely not a rat or a squirrel.
Timmins, who comes from the UK but now works for the US Wildlife Conservation Society, said as far as he knew no Western scientists had ever seen the animal alive.
laotian rock rat
Laonastes aenigmamus, as it has been called -- although Timmins prefers Laotian rock rat -- has a body about a foot long with a six- inch bushy tail.
"There is a chance this could be the last remaining mammal family left to be discovered," Timmins said. "As far as I can tell, the last time an entirely new family of mammals was discovered was in the 1970s."
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema