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A British scientific expedition to a remote rainforest in Papua New Guinea has discovered a new species of giant rat.
The Bosavi woolly rat is the size of a small domestic cat, weighing about 1.5 kilograms and measuring 82 centimetres in length from its nose to its tail.
It was discovered in the crater formed by the extinct volcano, Mount Bosavi.
Experts say the rat is the same as those found in any city’s sewers, only bigger.
Gordon Buchanan set up the infra-red camera which provided the first images of the animal.
“This is the biggest true rat in the world – unbelievable,” he said.
“It’s actually so big it doesn’t look like a rat … it just is incredible. This is a really significant find for the expedition.”
A couple of vaguely volcanic science news snippets from the BBC:
Giant rat found in ‘lost volcano’ – it isn’t really lost, it’s the extinct Mount Bosavi in south-east Papua New Guinea (John Seach has some information, and here’s an ESA image from 1992). The BBC has made a wildlife documentary there and found, among other things, a previously unknown giant rat, 82 cm long ‘with a silver-brown coat of long thick fur’, living at an elevation of around 1000 m within the crater.
Giant statues give up hat mystery – a team of archaeologists from the University of Manchester and University College London working on Easter Island have concluded that the big red hats atop those famous Easter Island statues ‘were rolled down from an ancient volcano … They pieced together a series of clues to discover how the statues got their red hats. An axe, a road, and an ancient volcano led to their findings’. The hats or topknots are made from red scoria, extracted from a quarry on Rano Kau volcano. The Manchester/London team are the first archaeologists to excavate the quarry itself, known as Puna Pau.
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