I'm Being Very Brave Today

the groundhog reportedly saw "a blood red sun. in the foreground a massive wheel framing the sun in the sky. the wheel has ceased to turn". nobody is sure what this means but its probably fine

"You think you're informed just because you read a bunch of grainy PDFs?"

Yeah man. Reading scholarly works on a topic informs you on that topic. That's how this works.

Animal of the Day!

Bramble Cay Melomys (Melomys rubicola)

(Photo from State of Queensland)

Extinction Date- 2015

Habitat- Bramble Cay

Size (Weight/Length)-16 cm

Diet- Succulents; Turtle eggs

Cool Facts- The Bramble Cay melomys may seem like an insignificant rodent, but these little guys were officially known as the first mammal to go extinct due to climate change. Found on a tiny island off the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, these melomys were threatened by a mixture of storms and rising sea level as the entire Cay was only 3 meters above sea level. During surveys, the last known Bramble Cay melomys was spotted in 2009 and they were officially declared extinct in 2015. Their extinction was a massive wakeup call for mammalian extinctions due to anthropocentric change. The Cape York melomys remains on mainland Australia is considered least concern thanks to preservation of their natural habitat and attempts of eliminating invasive species like foxes, cats, and rabbits. 

Rating- 12/10 (Forever remembered.)

Every day Road Work Wizard fills in potholes and every night Dark Road Work Wizard crafts new ones

Australian Water Rat aka Rakali (Hydromys chrysogaster), family Muridae, Canberra, Australia

Aquatic, predatory, and nocturnal rat, native to Australia.

photograph by Raw Shorty

4 billion baby stoats across the horizon

Colorata Yanbaru Creatures Ryukyu Long-furred Rat (Diplothrix legata) plush

A rat endemic to Japan that lives in Yanbaru, the northern part of the main island of Okinawa.

hey if anyone needs to know this is a gundi, it is an African rodent!! there are 5 species, and its closest relative is the Laotian rock rat

spreading cruel gossip with mama

Incamys bolivianus was a caviomorph rodent representing an early member of the chinchillid family, with its closest modern relatives being chinchillas and viscachas.

Living in what is now Bolivia and Argentina during the late Oligocene about 27 million years ago, it inhabited an arid open grassland at a time when the area's climate had drastically cooled due to the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

It's estimated to have been similar in size to a large modern chinchilla – weighing around 700g (~1lb 8oz) and measuring about 25-30cm long not including the tail (~10-12").

An endocast of the shape of its brain from a near-complete fossil skull shows that it had a well-developed sense of hearing, particularly in vocalization processing, suggesting it may have been a social animal living in groups communicating with complex calls similar to modern chinchillids. It was probably a ground-dweller less agile than its modern relatives, but still capable of fast movements.

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References:

Bertrand, Ornella C., et al. "The virtual brain endocast of Incamys bolivianus: insight from the neurosensory system into the adaptive radiation of South American rodents." Papers in Palaeontology 10.3 (2024): e1562. https://doi.org/10.1002/spp2.1562

Rasia, Luciano L., Adriana M. Candela, and Carola Cañón. "Comprehensive total evidence phylogeny of chinchillids (Rodentia, Caviomorpha): Cheek teeth anatomy and evolution." Journal of Anatomy 239.2 (2021): 405-423. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.13430

Wikipedia contributors. “Agua de la Piedra Formation” Wikipedia, 06 Jan. 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agua_de_la_Piedra_Formation

Wikipedia contributors. “Incamys” Wikipedia, 19 Jan. 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incamys