It was three metres long, it weighed 700kg and it grazed on the lush banks of a South American river eight million years ago.
Phoberomys pattersoni, alias Goya the giant guinea pig, is the biggest rodent ever found, according to the journal Science yesterday.
In May 2000 researchers began recovering the fossilized bones from a layer of shale in what is now a hot desert region of Venezuela called Urumaco, 402km west of Caracas.
Only when they found the jaw did they realize that they had found a rodent ten times bigger than any on earth today.
And only when they had taken a closer look at the almost complete skeleton did they realize they had a caviomorph, cousin to the modern cavy or guinea pig. The bones were found at Tio Gregorio -- and the Spanish diminutive for Gregorio is Goya.
"Imagine a weird guinea pig, with a long tail for balancing on its hind legs and continuously growing teeth," said Marcelo Sanchez-Villagra of the University of Tubingen in Germany.
"It was semi-aquatic, like the capybara, and probably foraged along a riverbank."
There are around 5,000 species of mammal on the planet today. Around 2,000 of them are rodents. The smallest weighs a few grams, the largest, the capybara, a few tens of kilograms.
The unearthing of a species at least 10 times bigger than all the rest raises huge questions about the pace and direction of evolution -- and economies of scale.
"This really is a stunning animal," said McNeill Alexander of the University of Leeds, an expert on the mechanics of animals.
"If you saw this animal at a distance on a misty day it would look much more like a cow or a buffalo than like a guinea pig. Supporting its weight is no problem.
"How about feeding itself? It would not be very easy to satisfy its appetite, because it is big. It has teeth which are obviously used for grinding abrasive food -- grass."
Like a cow, the giant guinea pig would have depended upon micro-organisms in its gut to turn grass into nourishment.
The bigger an animal's gut, the faster the supply of energy from the fermenting grass. But also, the bigger the animal, the more it conserves energy and the less it needs to eat.
Other rodents have not grown to this sort of size because they tend to run down boltholes to get away from predators, which is why it helps to be small. They cannot outrun their enemies in the open.
The implication is that Phoberomys had relatively few enemies at the time.
The Panamanian landbridge formed only three million years ago.
Until then, South America was separated from the northern continent, and Phoberomys lived in a very different world.
It would probably have been at home on dry land and in the water, and it lived alongside catfish, turtles with a carapace two metres long, and predators that included a giant flightless, carnivorous bird, a marsupial cat the size of a lion and crocodiles more than nine metres long.
JUMPING BAIL: The democracy advocate said made the decision after ‘considering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health’ Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow (周庭), who was jailed over her role in massive 2019 protests, on Sunday said she had moved to Canada and would not return to meet her bail conditions. Chow was one of the best-known young faces of the 2012, 2014 and 2019 protest movements against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong. She spent about seven months behind bars for her role in a protest outside Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019, when huge crowds rallied week after week in the most serious challenge to China’s rule since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. On Sunday
TAKING STOCK: It was not yet clear how damaging the espionage, dating to 1981, has been, as authorities are still assessing the situation, the State Department said A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the US “the enemy.” US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions within the government to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the US. The charges against Rocha, 73, expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign
DARK WARNINGS: If Trump survives his court trials, neither the Supreme Court nor the US Constitution could stop him from becoming president for life, a ‘Post’ column said Former US president Donald Trump on Tuesday declined to rule out abusing power if he returns to the White House after Fox News host Sean Hannity asked him to respond to growing criticism of his rhetoric. The Republican presidential front-runner has talked about targeting his rivals — referring to them as “vermin” — and vowed to seek retribution if he wins a second term for what he argues are politically motivated prosecutions against him. As Trump has dominated the Republican presidential primary, US President Joe Biden has stepped up his own warnings, contending that Trump is “determined to destroy American democracy.” “Under no
Seventeen people died and 11 were injured when a passenger bus careered off a road on a “killer curve” and plunged down a mountain in the central Philippines, officials said yesterday. The bus was traveling in Hamtic municipality in Antique province when the crash happened on Tuesday afternoon, Antique Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office head Roderick Train said. Seven people were in critical condition in a hospital and four others were stable, Train said, describing the section of road as “accident prone.” One Kenyan national was among those killed, and a second Kenyan was among those critically injured. The bus, which came from
RSS