Scientists thought a mysterious guinea pig-sized rodent species that hadn't been seen in 113 years was long extinct. Until one of them ambled up to two volunteer naturalists at a nature reserve in Colombia two weeks ago.
"He just shuffled up the handrail near where we were sitting and seemed totally unperturbed by all the excitement he was causing," Lizzie Noble, who is volunteering with the ProAves Foundation, Colombia's largest bird conservation organization, said in a release.
The nocturnal animal, the elusive red-crested tree rat, turned up just as Noble and Simon McKeown were heading off to bed, at 9:30 p.m. on May 4. It spent two hours watching as the volunteer biologists took photos of it, then calmly ambled off into the darkness.
The smallish rodent, which they estimated weighed just under a pound, had a white and black tail and a distinctive red mane of fur on its head and looked like a guinea pig or a gerbil.
Because the naturalists were there to monitor amphibians, they had no idea what they were seeing beyond a cute little animal. So Noble emailed copies of the pictures she'd taken to naturalist Paul Salaman, who was also in Colombia at the time. Salaman is the director of conservation with the World Land Trust-USA. By coincidence, his organization had helped fund a team that spent over a year looking for the red-crested tree rat in Colombia between 2007 and 2008.
Salaman was deep in the hinterlands himself and didn't get to a place where he had internet access until May 8. When he read his email he was astounded to see the animals he and others had been looking for for years, he said by phone from Washington D.C..
"I said 'Oh my God, this is it!'"
The red-crested tree rat was known only through descriptions and the skin from an animal captured in 1898 that is at the New York Museum of Natural History, Salaman says. It was only in 2005 that Louise Emmons of the Smithsonian Institution, working from the pelts, identified it as Santamartamys rufodorsalis.
Salaman couldn't believe it. "We had two Colombian biologists in the field. They tried everywhere, they put traps in the trees, on the ground, they looked everywhere, and then it just walked up to these biologists," he says. "I called Lizzie on Skype and I said 'You just rediscovered these animals we spent years trying to find!'"
Very little is known about the animal. It appears to have no other rats in its genus, just as humans, homo sapiens, are they only representative of our genus. "It could be many tens of millions of years old," says Salaman. "An ancient relic of a rodent that happened to get isolated in this area."
There's no doubt the animal they photographed was the elusive red-crested tree rat, says Salaman. The photos were sent to the Smithsonian's Emmons and she concurred. "There's nothing else that's even remotely similar to it that occurs in this area," he says.
In addition, the animal popped up only few miles from where the original pelts were collected 113 years ago, he says.
The rodent was found in the El Dorado Nature Reserve, 2,000 acres of cloud forest preserved by the Colombian bird conservation group ProAves with help from the American Bird Conservancy and others. It is home to multiple endangered bird and other species in a region where coffee plantations and cattle grazing are rapidly destroying the forest.
The whole episode is slightly surreal, says Salaman. The animal actually met the biologists on the stair as they were heading up to their bunks "It climbed up the banister and walked up to them and sat there for two hours, It's almost as if it were trying to show it had survived."
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"He just shuffled up the handrail near where we were sitting and seemed totally unperturbed by all the excitement he was causing," Lizzie Noble, who is volunteering with the ProAves Foundation, Colombia's largest bird conservation organization, said in a release.
The nocturnal animal, the elusive red-crested tree rat, turned up just as Noble and Simon McKeown were heading off to bed, at 9:30 p.m. on May 4. It spent two hours watching as the volunteer biologists took photos of it, then calmly ambled off into the darkness.
The smallish rodent, which they estimated weighed just under a pound, had a white and black tail and a distinctive red mane of fur on its head and looked like a guinea pig or a gerbil.
Because the naturalists were there to monitor amphibians, they had no idea what they were seeing beyond a cute little animal. So Noble emailed copies of the pictures she'd taken to naturalist Paul Salaman, who was also in Colombia at the time. Salaman is the director of conservation with the World Land Trust-USA. By coincidence, his organization had helped fund a team that spent over a year looking for the red-crested tree rat in Colombia between 2007 and 2008.
Salaman was deep in the hinterlands himself and didn't get to a place where he had internet access until May 8. When he read his email he was astounded to see the animals he and others had been looking for for years, he said by phone from Washington D.C..
"I said 'Oh my God, this is it!'"
The red-crested tree rat was known only through descriptions and the skin from an animal captured in 1898 that is at the New York Museum of Natural History, Salaman says. It was only in 2005 that Louise Emmons of the Smithsonian Institution, working from the pelts, identified it as Santamartamys rufodorsalis.
Salaman couldn't believe it. "We had two Colombian biologists in the field. They tried everywhere, they put traps in the trees, on the ground, they looked everywhere, and then it just walked up to these biologists," he says. "I called Lizzie on Skype and I said 'You just rediscovered these animals we spent years trying to find!'"
Very little is known about the animal. It appears to have no other rats in its genus, just as humans, homo sapiens, are they only representative of our genus. "It could be many tens of millions of years old," says Salaman. "An ancient relic of a rodent that happened to get isolated in this area."
There's no doubt the animal they photographed was the elusive red-crested tree rat, says Salaman. The photos were sent to the Smithsonian's Emmons and she concurred. "There's nothing else that's even remotely similar to it that occurs in this area," he says.
In addition, the animal popped up only few miles from where the original pelts were collected 113 years ago, he says.
The rodent was found in the El Dorado Nature Reserve, 2,000 acres of cloud forest preserved by the Colombian bird conservation group ProAves with help from the American Bird Conservancy and others. It is home to multiple endangered bird and other species in a region where coffee plantations and cattle grazing are rapidly destroying the forest.
The whole episode is slightly surreal, says Salaman. The animal actually met the biologists on the stair as they were heading up to their bunks "It climbed up the banister and walked up to them and sat there for two hours, It's almost as if it were trying to show it had survived."
For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.
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