"Mystery mouse" is Lazarus furball

[Nick Pharris <npharris@umich.edu>]

_Laonastes aenigmamus_, the weird Laotian rodent described last year 
and placed in its own monotypic family, turns out to belong to the 
Diatomyidae, previously thought to have died out in the Miocene:

Abstract:

The living Laotian rodent Laonastes aenigmamus, first described in 
early 2005, has been interpreted as the sole member of the new family 
Laonastidae on the basis of its distinctive morphology and apparent 
phylogenetic isolation from other living rodents. Here we show that 
Laonastes is actually a surviving member of the otherwise extinct 
rodent family Diatomyidae, known from early Oligocene to late Miocene 
sites in Pakistan, India, Thailand, China, and Japan. Laonastes is a 
particularly striking example of the "Lazarus effect" in Recent 
mammals, whereby a taxon that was formerly thought to be extinct is 
rediscovered in the extant biota, in this case after a temporal gap of 
roughly 11 million years.

Reference:

Science 10 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5766, pp. 1456 - 1458

--
Nick Pharris
Department of Linguistics
University of Michigan

"Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity."
    --Edwin H. Land