Scientific Illustration

claramferreira:

Garden dormouse (Eliomys quercinus)

claramferreira:

And finally, Red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris)

Only now I realized I could do a Hedgehog too! D’oh!

Jerboa. by Library & Archives @ Royal Ontario Museum on Flickr.

Author: Bruce, James, 1730-1794.
Title: Select Specimens of Natural History, Collected in Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, in Egypt, Arabia, Abyssinia, and Nubia.
Imprint: Edinburgh : Printed by J. Ruthven, for G. G. J. and J. Robinson …, 1790.
Physical Description: 1 print : engraving ; plate mark 220 x 280 mm on leaf 23 x 30 cm.
Page: Interleaved p. 120-121..
Call Number: DT377 .B887 1790 V.5 Rare Book

claramferreira:

The city of Guimarães, being the culture capital of 2012, is organizing several events. POP UP culture was occupying the market this March and invited everybody to draw on the walls. While my boyfriend occupied a huge part of the wall, I took the liberty to spread some micromammals all over the space.

This was the first one, and of course, it HAD to be my dearest Cabrera’s Vole, although it looks more like a Water Vole (Arvicola sp.).

More will follow in the next few days. :)

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)

rhamphotheca:

eximago: Exotic Rodents

(large neotropical rodents - central and south america)

Jordfundne og nulevende gnavere (Rodentia) fra Lagoa Santa, Minas Geraes, Brasilien by BioDivLibrary on Flickr.

Kjøbenhavn :F. Dreyer,1887..
biodiversitylibrary.org/page/14664055

rhamphotheca:

Fossil Rodents With Supertough Teeth Found

Newfound species may have lived in world’s earliest grassland, study says.

by Brian Handwerk

Two new species of fossil rodent shed light on South America as an evolutionary hot spot, a new study says. Both have super-tough teeth, which suggest they may have roamed the world’s earliest grassland.

Andemys termasi, nicknamed the “mouse of the Andes,” would have looked like a rat and is the oldest known relative of the modern agouti, a rodent of Central and South American rain forests. The other new species, Eoviscaccia frassinettii, is the oldest known relative of the chinchilla—which it likely resembled—and vizcachas, which live in South American mountains and grasslands.

The newfound species, which lived 32 million years ago, are the second oldest ever found in South America after Peruvian mouselike and ratlike animals that date to some 41 million years ago…

(read more: National Geo)      (image: V. Simeonovski and D.A. Croft)

William King Gregory’s 1946 tree of rodent relationships.

Gregory, 1951, Evolution Emerging: A Survey of Changing Patterns from Primeval Life to Man, vol. 2, p. 757; fig. 20.33; courtesy of Mary DeJong, Mai Qaraman, and the American Museum of Natural History.

From: Trees of Life A Visual History of Evolution by Theodore W. Pietsch

ISBN: 9781421404790

lostbeasts:

Josephoartigasia monesi

The largest rodent known. Only a skull has been found, so full restorations have to be estimated from close relatives or rodents known from the same time period.
It would have possibly weighed up to 1,000 kg… a modern Black Rhino weighs 1,400 kg.