A team of archaeologists have unearthed the fossils of huge rats in Southeast Asia that could surely give the ones in the NYC Subway a run for their money. The team, from Australian National University, found seven giant fossils on East Timor that are at least ten times the size of the rodents we see roaming around today.
They label this rodent a mega-fauna species, and they’d be five kilos at the heaviest. This makes them the largest rats ever known, about the size of a small dog. The team’s mission is originally to travel from Sunda to Sahul as part of an homonymous project that looks at the earliest human movement throughout the region of Southeast Asia, and in their travels, they stumbled upon the huge rats. The team isn’t sure what caused the animals to get wiped out or if it was connected to humans, but the rodents roamed the area around 46,000 years.
The team concludes that they must have coexisted with humans for a long time, damage to the huge rats fossils show that humans were eating them. The theory for their extinction is most likely tied to the spread of weapons make of metal, which made forests easier to tear down and habitats easier to destroy.
