Publication Date:
2003-09-23
Description:
The largest living rodent is the South American capybara, a creature the size of a sheep that unlike smaller rodents stands on relatively straight legs. However, as Alexander explains in his Perspective, a new fossil find in Venezuela (Sanchez-Villagra et al.) reveals that the capybara would be dwarfed by Phoberomys, a giant rodent the size of a buffalo that lived during the Miocene Epoch.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Alexander, R McNeill -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2003 Sep 19;301(5640):1678-9.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Pure and Applied Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. r.m.alexander@leeds.ac.uk〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14500968" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
*Biological Evolution
;
Body Constitution
;
Body Weight
;
Diet
;
Energy Metabolism
;
Femur/anatomy & histology
;
Fermentation
;
*Fossils
;
Hindlimb/anatomy & histology
;
Locomotion
;
Rodentia/*anatomy & histology/metabolism
;
Tooth/anatomy & histology
;
Venezuela
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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