As rats go, this one is pretty cute. And until Tuesday, the world was oblivious to its existence. But thanks to the fieldwork of a research team from Australia, Indonesia and America the 250-gram animal has been discovered in the remote, high-altitude jungle of Sulawesi, Indonesia. 
 
 Described for the first time in the Journal of Mammalogy, this new species of mammal is so unique that it also represents a new genus. 
 
 Museum Victoria mammalogist Kevin Rowe, a member of the team that found the rat in 2013, said among the distinct features were its very small mouth, large white front teeth, big ears and noticeably long pubic hairs. 
 
 Dr Kevin Rowe of the Museum Victoria, with a specimen of the newly discovered mammal species, the hog-nosed rat, found in Indonesia. Photo: Eddie Jim 
 
 "It was exciting as I knew immediately that we had a new species," Dr Rowe said. "I am still amazed that we can walk into a forest and find a new species of mammal that is so obviously different from any species, or even genus, that has ever been documented by science." 
 
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 While scientists are yet to observe a live hog-nosed rat, the five specimens caught in overnight traps boast long hind limbs similar to a bandicoot, suggesting it might hop, and long pubic hairs not seen in rats but featured on an Australian hopping mammal, the potoroo. 
 
 The mouth can hardly open suggesting the carnivorous rat 'slurps' up its food - most likely earthworms, beetle larvae and other invertebrates. 
 
 Meet the newest mammal discovered: the hog-nosed rat from Indonesia. Photo: Museum Victoria 
 
 "It looks like it's whistling all the time," Dr Rowe said. 
 
 While the 40-45 centimetre animal's unique anatomy was evidence it was a new species, genetic testing confirmed it was also a new genus. 
 
 The hog-nosed rat was found in the cool but humid moss forests of Sulawesi's northern peninsula, 1600 metres above sea level. The nearest village is a two-hour hike away and even that village is considered remote. 
 
 The pig-like nose with forward-facing nostrils inspired its Greek-in-origin genus name: Hyorhinomys ('hyo' meaning hog, 'rhino' meaning nose and 'mys' meaning rat). 
 
 Named by the discovery team from Museum Victoria, Indonesia's Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense and the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, the rat's scientific name is Hyorhinomys stuempkei. 
 
 Dr Rowe said the rat's closest relative was a group of shrew rats found on Sulawesi but that they were not closely related. All rats and mice evolved 25 million years ago, of which there are about 1500 known species. 
 
 Geologically isolated, Sulawesi has not been connected to Australia or Asia for 10 million years. The fieldwork is part of a wider project to document and establish the area's biodiversity, long considered a hot spot of endemic species. ||||| Hog-nosed Shrew Rat (courtesy: Kevin C. Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals, Museum Victoria) Hog-nosed Shrew Rat (courtesy: Kevin C. Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals, Museum Victoria) Jake Esselstyn, Curator of Mammals for the LSU Museum of Natural Science (courtesy: Kevin C. Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals, Museum Victoria) 
 
 LSU Museum of Natural Science Curator of Mammals Jake Esselstyn and his international collaborators have discovered a new genus and species on a remote, mountainous island in Indonesia. This new discovery is the third new genus described by this group of scientists since 2012, and identifies a rodent with features never seen by the scientific community before. 
 
 On the second morning of their field season in 2013, Esselstyn and Museum Victoria Senior Curator of Mammals Kevin Rowe set out in opposite directions from their field camp to check their traps. Unbeknownst to each other, they both caught the same type of animal in their respective traps and immediately knew they were looking at a new species. 
 
 “We had never seen anything like this. It was obviously a new species. We came back to camp and were both surprised that the other one had it as well,” Esselstyn said. 
 
 The animal is a shrew rat with a large, flat, pink nose and forward-facing nostrils for which they named the Hog-nosed rat, or Hyorhinomys stuempkei. With extremely large ears, long hind legs that may be used for hopping, long white incisors and very long urogenital hairs, the Hog-nosed rat is so genetically different from any other species that the scientists described it as a new genus. This discovery is the cover story of the Journal of Mammalogy this month. 
 
 Long incisors are a trait of shrew rats. But the Hog-nosed rat has especially long incisors. Another distinct characteristic of the Hog-nosed rat is that it lacks a jaw muscle attachment point found in most mammals called the coronoid process on the dentary bone. 
 
 “I don’t know of any other rodents that have lost the coronoid process completely,” Esselstyn said. 
 
 The loss of the coronoid process indicates a weak jaw musculature and a diet that does not require vigorous chewing. The scientists found that the new species eats earthworms and beetle larvae. 
 
 Challenging Study Site 
 
 The island of Sulawesi in Indonesia is geographically complex, mountainous and challenging to scientifically sample. Little research has been conducted on the island since the early 20th century. 
 
 “On Sulawesi, there is a lot of ground to cover and most of it hasn’t been surveyed before, especially at high elevation,” Esselstyn said. 
 
 He and his collaborators from Australia and Indonesia have been studying the region since 2010. Inundated by constant rain, the study site for this discovery was a moss-covered habitat on Mt. Dako at about 1,600 meters elevation and a two-day trek from the nearest village. 
 
 “There’s a lot of biogeographic complexity at Sulawesi. So we’re not too surprised that we’re finding new things. But our team has been a bit surprised by the degree to which these animals are really novel. They are not just subtly different organisms, but really charismatically different,” Rowe said. 
 
 The scientists described the Few-toothed shrew rat, or Paucidentomys vermidax, in 2012. One of the reasons why scientists have thought that rodents have been evolutionarily successful is they have incisors for gnawing and molars for grinding. 
 
 “However, this rat we described in 2012, doesn’t have molars and they really can’t gnaw because of the shape of their incisors. Interestingly, this species has lost the two things that we think made rodents successful,” Esselstyn said. 
 
 In 2014, the scientists described the Sulawesi water rat, Waiomys mamasae, which was known to villagers and their guides but not to the scientific community. Villagers use this animal as a talisman to protect their homes against fire. 
 
 “Our guides didn’t tell us right away that they had caught it. We were asleep and they were up late at night discussing whether they should give it to us or keep it for themselves. We were very glad that they eventually decided to give it to us, because otherwise we would have left and never had known about this animal,” he said. 
 
 These animals Esselstyn and his colleagues have described are new species within new genera, because the animals could not be placed within any existing group. After sequencing the DNA from the specimens, the scientists had the molecular evidence to confirm the species’ unique distinctions. ||||| Study of skull, as well as DNA analysis, confirms new species in genus of mosaic tailed rats or Uromys 
 
 A mysterious and elusive species of giant rat that lives in the dense rainforest canopy of the Solomon Islands, and is reputed to open coconuts with its teeth, has been discovered by scientists and is likely to be quickly listed as critically endangered. 
 
 
 
 For decades, the rat’s existence had been suspected, with traditional knowledge of the rat’s ecology noted in a publications. For example, in 1995, one account recorded traditional knowledge of “a very big rat that eats coconuts” and lived in the trees. 
 
 Tyrone Lavery, a mammalogist from the Field Museum in Chicago, heard rumours of the giant, possum-like rat on the island of Vangunu on his first trip to the Solomon Islands in 2010, which the locals called “vika”. 
 
 But extensive trappings, spotlight searches and motion-activated “camera traps” led by Lavery failed to reveal the storied rat. The only clue Lavery found of it was large rat faeces in 2011. 
 
 “I started to question if it really was a separate species, or if people were just calling regular black rats ‘vika’,” Lavery said. 
 
 
 
 But, in 2016, as a tree was cut down by commercial loggers, villagers who Lavery had been working with saw one fall to the ground, sustaining serious injuries. The rat died shortly afterwards but Lavery said the elders in the village of Zaira confidently identified the specimen as vika. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tyrone Lavery, a mammalogist from the Field Museum in Chicago, named the rat Uromys vika. Photograph: Tyrone Lavery 
 
 Careful study of the skull, as well as DNA analysis, confirmed it was a new species in the genus of “mosaic tailed rats” or Uromys, which Lavery named Uromys vika, after the traditional name for the rat. 
 
 The specimen they found, although missing some of its tail, was estimated to be over 45cm long and weighing more than half a kilogram. 
 
 Tim Flannery, a world-leading expert in the mammalogy of the Solomon Islands, told the Guardian it was an exciting and important discovery. 
 
 “It’s a remarkable new discovery of a mosaic tailed rat that found its way from either Australia or New Guinea several million years ago,” Flannery said. “It’s one of the most astonishing discoveries made in the new millennium and not a moment too soon. It’s highly endangered by logging and urgent action is required to prevent its extinction.” 
 
 Lavery said he had not found evidence of the rat eating coconuts but he had found evidence that they had eaten ngali nuts, a local nut that he said would be as hard to crack open as coconuts. 
 
 “If they could get through a ngail nut shell, they could get through a coconut,” he told the Guardian. 
 
 Lavery said he was driven to discover the rat through both a sense of adventure and a concern for conservation. 
 
 “I was excited because I had just started my PhD and I’d read a lot of books about people who go on adventures and discover new species,” Lavery said. “It’s a really interesting case. There’s traditional knowledge that it exists. And there’s old history notes from anthropologists and other people that have visited the island that these things exist. 
 
 “Secondly, it’s important to know they exist so that we can work out ways of conserving them. In the case of vika, it looks like logging is a really big threat to the species. There is not much of Vangunu left that hasn’t been logged.” 
 
 All sightings of the rat have been reported in kapuchu tree, including the captured specimen, which is highly sought after by commercial loggers. The total area of habitat that Lavery estimated the rat could potentially live in comprises just 81 square kilometres. 
 
 
 
 The paper describing the find, published in the journal Mammalogy, recommends it be listed an the category “critically endangered” by the IUCN. 
 
 Lavery said that right next to where the rat was found was a community conservation area run by a village called Zaira. 
 
 “We’re hoping that, now we’ve found this rat, it will add some recognition to their conservation area and help support them in their work.” 
 
 Lavery said he planned to launch a crowd-funding campaign to help the community build a station for the rangers that work in the conservation area.
– A newly found creature's name is the hog-nosed rat, and things don't get any more picturesque from there. Reporting on their find in the Journal of Mammalogy, scientists describe the animal, found in 2013 on Mount Dako, on Indonesia's Sulawesi Island: It's a long-faced carnivorous creature with "extremely large ears (~21% of head and body length) [and] very long urogenital hairs"—the latter being pubic hairs. Co-author Kevin Rowe tells Mashable Australia that it's unclear what purpose the hair serves, though "it probably helps it in some kind of reproductive way. Both males and females have those long ... hairs, like whiskers. They're not like human pubic hairs." Among its other features: Rowe explains that the 18-inch-long rat's mouth opening is so narrow that it can't open it much. "It probably eats worms and insect larvae, just kind of slurping them up." (In line with that slurping, it also lacks the coronoid process on the dentary bone, which other mammals rely on to chew.) KNOE reports it's the third genus newly identified by the international team since 2012 (here's another of the team's finds), and recalls the moment the rat was found—twice. Rowe, of Museum Victoria, and LSU Museum of Natural Science Curator of Mammals Jake Esselstyn went to check their respective traps, saw what was clear to them was a new species, "came back to camp and were both surprised that the other one had it as well." The rodent was given the name Hyorhinomys stuempkei, which the Age translates from the Greek as "'hyo' meaning hog, 'rhino' meaning nose and 'mys' meaning rat." (Another unusual animal-related find: a mysterious, giant, jellylike "thing.")