A New Rat

Long before the days of photography a natural scientist would need to be or to have in his team an artist, so that new species could be recorded. It's good to see this tradition is still alive. Shown is Jon Fjeldsa's excellent painting of a Spiny Boki Mekot Rat (2013). This is a new genus with tufts of bristly hair on its back and a white tip to its tail. It was found in the mountain forests of Halmahera, in the Moluccas (Maluku) archipelago. Now look at the BBC's cropped version of this painting: CLICK. Too good to be a photo, I thought. So I tracked down the original.