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Watch out Heathcliff , there ’s a rat out there bigger than you . Or at least there was . Just a couplet thousand yr ago , the world ’s large squealer , weighing more than the average planetary house bozo , scuttled about what is now East Timor of Southeast Asia .
The skeletal corpse of the robust rodent were find in a cave , investigator announced today . The archeological site also turn up 13 other species of rodent , 11 of which are new to scientific discipline , with eight of the rats estimated to have weigh more than 2 pounds ( 1 kg ) .
Here, the upper tooth rows of Timor’s extinct giant rat (left), the biggest rat that ever lived, compared with the skull of a black rat (right), one of the most common rats, weighing some 5 ounces (150 grams). The skull of the black rat shown here is 35 mm long.
When live , the giant of the lot weighed some 13.2 pounds ( 6 kilograms ) . For comparison , a house rat weighs on mediocre 5 ounces ( 150 grams ) . Today’sheftiest ratsweigh around 4.4 lb ( 2 kilogram ) and exist in rainwater forests in the Philippines and New Guinea .
C dating suggests the animal hold out up until 1,000 to 2,000 years ago , along with most of the other Timorese gnawer discover during the excavations . Only one of the small species found is fuck to live on Timor today , the researchers say .
" the great unwashed have lived on the island of Timor for over 40,000 years and hunted and ate rats throughout this period , yet extinctions did not occur until quite of late , " said study researcher Ken Aplin of CSIRO , adding that the comer of humans to an area does n’t necessarily have to equate with extinctions . ( CSIRO is the national government activity torso for scientific enquiry in Australia . )
" bombastic - exfoliation clarification of timber for agriculture probably caused the extinctions , and this may have only been possible follow the launching of alloy tools , " Aplin said .
East Indonesia is a hotspot forrat evolution , Aplin pronounce . In fact , each of the islands of easterly Indonesia evolved it own unique bum species . Aplin also has found six new rat species in a cave on the island of Flores .
Though most of Timor today is arid , it was once covered by lush rainfall forests . Even so , Aplin does n’t rule out finding other " new " creatures today .
" Although less than 15 pct of Timor ’s original wood cover persist , part of the island are still heavily forested , so who knows what might be out there ? " Aplin aver .
Aplin and Kris Helgen of the Smithsonian Institution detail their findings this workweek in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History .
