Scientific Illustration

Disection of Rattus Rattus for A level biology coursework.

Thanks for the submission idlewitness!

skullandbone:

rat skeleton illustration

rhamphotheca:

GOOD NEWS:

Two-foot-long cloud rat rediscovered after missing for forty years in the Philippines

by Jeremy Hance

Czech computer programmer, Vaclav Rehak, was the first person to see a living Dinagat bushy-tailed cloud rat (Crateromys australis) in nearly forty years, reports GMA News. Rehak was traveling on Dinagat Island with his new wife, Milada Rehakova-Petru, a specialist on Philippine tarsiers, when he stumbled on the rodent, which has only been recorded once by scientists in 1975. Found only on the Dinagat Island, the rodent was feared extinct, but is now imperiled by mining concessions and logging across its small habitat, which is thought to be less than 100 square kilometers.

“My husband, programmer Vaclav Rehak, saw a big hairy rat creeping through the vegetation slowly at the beginning of 2012. A week later, we took the first photographs and video recordings [of the rodent] in the wild,” Milada Reháková-Petru told Czech media, Ceske Noviny…

The almost orange-colored rodent sports a long tail with a bushy white end. From head to tip-of-tail, the Dinagat bushy-tailed cloud rat is nearly 2 feet (21.6 inches, 55 centimeters) long, making it one of the world’s longest rodents. Currently listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN Red List, it was thought ‘possibly extinct.”…

(read more: MongaBay)                

(images: L - Milada Řeháková and Vaclav Rehak/Tarsius Project; R - William Oliver, Philippines Biodiversity Conservation Foundation)

Male Genitalia of the guinea pig and Brown rat by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.

Annales des sciences naturelles :.
Paris :Crochard.
biodiversitylibrary.org/page/5756017

compendium-of-beasts:

Rodentia. (c1880)

via NYPL

compendium-of-beasts:

1. Dipodomys agilis, Pouched Jumping Mouse (California, Oregon?); 2. Neotoma occidentalis, Bushy Tailed Rat (coast of Wa… (1860)

via NYPL

biomedicalephemera:

Mus macleari [now Rattus macleari]- Maclear’s Rat

This extinct indigenous rat of Christmas Island is thought to have been the primary population control for the local crab species, along with the also-extinct bulldog rat. Between those two rodents, and the local Christmas Island shrew (not sighted since 1908 and presumed extinct), the Christmas Island red crabs that provide a somewhat-unnerving migration spectacle, were kept at a level thought to be about one-half what they were at their height. These days, the aptly-named “yellow crazy ant” that was inadvertently introduced from Australia, has cut the red crab population by a third, but unlike Maclear’s and the bulldog rat, the yellow crazy ant has no population control of its own, and may one day entirely wipe out the red crabs.

The Maclear’s rat is thought to have gone extinct both due to humans killing them, and the introduction of black rats to the island, when the Challenger expedition landed there in 1876. The black rats carried a trypanosome which affected them to a mild degree, but would have wiped out any non-acclimated species that acquired it in large numbers.

Proceedings of the Scientific Meetings of the Zoological Society of London. 1887.

onestonedcrow:

Athanasius Kircher 1667

Via marinni

compendium-of-beasts:

Little homes. (187-) [Thieves!, Thieves!]

via NYPL

Ventral view of the brain of an adult albino rat

From: ‘An introduction to the finer anatomy of the central nervous system based upon that of the albino rat‘ With 28 plates and 10 illustrations in the text; by E. Horne Craigie. Published 1925