this new animal (below) really made my day - back from the fossils! Where 
were you for the last 11 million years? Oh I was busy. Keeping out of harm's 
way.   I remember that news about the thought-to-be-extinct re-discovered 
hairy eared mouse lemur broke a few years ago, but that hadn't been away for 
quite so long...

I like the last sentence of the article, "And now the challenge is to trap 
live ones..." Ah yes, of course it is. That's probably why they were hiding 
in the first place...

- Edmund

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/03/09/species.survivor.ap/index.html

Rat-squirrel back after 11-million-year absence
Scientists: Animal in Laotian jungle isn't new species, but old one

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It has the face of a rat and the tail of a skinny
squirrel -- and scientists say this creature discovered living in central
Laos is pretty special: It's a species believed to have been extinct for 11
million years.

The long-whiskered rodent made international headlines last spring when
biologists declared they'd discovered a new species, nicknamed the Laotian
rock rat.

It turns out the little guy isn't new after all, but a rare kind of
survivor: a member of a group until now known only from fossils.

Nor is it a rat. This species, called Diatomyidae, looks more like small
squirrels or tree shrews, said paleontologist Mary Dawson of Pittsburgh's
Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Dawson, with colleagues in France and China, report the creature's new
identity in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

The resemblance is "absolutely striking," Dawson said. As soon as her team
spotted reports about the rodent's discovery, "we thought, 'My goodness,
this is not a new family. We've known it from the fossil record."'

They set out to prove that through meticulous comparisons between the bones
of today's specimens and fossils found in China and elsewhere in Asia.

To reappear after 11 million years is more exciting than if the rodent
really had been a new species, said George Schaller, a naturalist with the
Wildlife Conservation Society, which unveiled the creature's existence last
year. Indeed, such reappearances are so rare that paleontologists dub them
"the Lazarus effect."

Another well-known example is the coelacanth, a primitive fish that existed
before the dinosaurs and was thought to have gone extinct 65 million years
ago, until one was caught in 1938 off the coast of southern Africa.

"It shows you it's well worth looking around in this world, still, to see
what's out there," Schaller said.

The nocturnal rodent lives in Laotian forests largely unexplored by
outsiders, because of the geographic remoteness and history of political
turmoil.

Schaller called the area "an absolute wonderland," because biologists who
have ventured in have found unique animals, like a type of wild ox called
the saola, barking deer, and never-before-seen bats. Dawson described it as
a prehistoric zoo, teeming with information about past and present
biodiversity.

All the attention to the ancient rodent will be "wonderful for
conservation," Schaller said. "This way, Laos will be proud of that region
for all these new animals, which will help conservation in that some of the
forests, I hope, will be preserved."

Locals call the rodent kha-nyou. Scientists haven't yet a bagged a breathing
one, only the bodies of those recently caught by hunters or for sale at meat
markets, where researchers with the New York-based conservation society
first spotted the creature.

Now the challenge is to trap live ones and calculate how many still exist to
determine whether the species is endangered, Dawson said.