The Solomon Islands number almost 1,000, and were named, in 1568, by a Spanish navigator in honor of King Solomon, the biblical ruler with untold riches.
Like the king, the islands were thought to possess tremendous wealth. And they do, in their way, not in gold, silver, or jewels, but in biodiversity—their coral reefs and rain forests teem with varieties of flora and fauna, many of which are unique in the world. Now a new treasure has emerged, from inside a felled tree and chronicled in the Journal of Mammalogy. It’s an 18-inch rat, and it had never been successfully caught by scientists before.Unsurprisingly, “vika” were not unknown to the residents of Vangunu Island, in the Western Province of the archipelago. They described this beast, in all its giant, coconut-cracking, tree-dwelling splendor to mammalogist Tyrone Lavery, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago. He ended up making 10 separate trips to try to capture the rodent after having caught only a glimpse of one scurrying away from him on a hike in 2012. Lavery began to worry that…
The post A Giant, ‘Coconut Eating’ Rat Has Been Discovered in the Solomon Islands appeared first on FeedBox.