Apr 26, 2021 05:00 AM EDT
According to scientists, giant cloud rats once roamed the Earth thousands of years ago. They believe humans played a part in the extinction of the now-extinct creatures, which were furry with large, bushy tails.
The findings of the study were published in the Journal of Mammalogy.
Bushy Tailed Ancient Rodents
(Photo : Julan Shirwod Nueva on Wikimedia Commons)
Scientists have found that cute furry, bushy-tailed rodents twice the size of gray squirrels once roamed the Earth thousands of years ago.
Since the rodent went extinct a few thousand years ago, the fossilized bones of this giant cloud rat population were discovered in a network of caves in the Philippines.
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(Photo : Max Fleischer, Dave Fleischer and Ovide Decroly on Wikimedia Commons)
Since modern humans left Africa around 50,000 years ago, ancient DNA from Neanderthals and early modern humans revealed that the two groups actually interbred somewhere in the Near East. As a result, anyone outside of Africa carries about 2% to 3% Neanderthal DNA. Those Neanderthal DNA segments grew progressively shorter in modern human genomes over time, and their length can be used to approximate when a person lived.
Furthermore, archeological evidence released last year indicates that modern humans were already present in southeastern Europe 47-43,000 years ago. However, nothing is known about who these early human colonists were - or their connections to ancient and modern human communities - owing to a shortage of reasonably complete human fossils and the absence of genomic DNA.