2012-03-15 14:46:53
The capybara or capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), measuring one meter thirty in length and weighing up to 85 kilos, is the largest living species among rodents. Its relative, the giant capybara (Protohydrochoerus) from the Pliocene, between 4 and 2.5 million years ago, reached the size of a tapir, with two meters in length and about three hundred kilos in weight. But the largest rodents in history were not capybaras. They all lived in South America, and belonged to the telicomid family, of which today only the pacarana (Dinomys branickii) survives, a not too large rodent, eighty centimeters long and weighing little more than ten kilos, which lives in the jungles of the western Amazon basin.
Five and a half million years ago, at the end of the Miocene period and the beginning of the Pliocene, lived Telycomis, two meters long. It is the species that gives its name to the family. But not the biggest. In 2000, the almost complete skeleton of Phoberomys pattersoni, the “Patterson’s terror mouse”, named after paleontologist Bryan Patterson, a scholar of tertiary South American mammals, was discovered in Urumaco (Venezuela). Phoberomys pattersoni was four and a half meters long, and a close species, Phoberomys insolita, was possibly somewhat larger, although its remains are too incomplete to say for sure.
The largest rodent known to date, Josephoartigasia monesi, received its name in honor of José Artigas, a hero of the independence of Uruguay, and the Uruguayan paleontologist Álvaro Mones. Its almost complete skull, more than half a meter long, was discovered on the coast of the Río de la Plata, in Uruguay, in 1987, although it was not scientifically described until 2008. Its size and weight, according to various estimates that have been have made, were similar to those of the black rhinoceros.
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