Cuties! Saw these guys right next to the road at a local park, took some pics from in the car. There were about five mice in the immediate area, coming in and out of a large shrub to forage, seemingly unaware that it was daytime. It was in a rural area, so maybe there just aren’t many predators? @why-animals-do-the-thing any clue what mice would be doing foraging in broad daylight?
Also, anyone know what the bigger one is? I know the mouse is a deer mouse, but I’m not sure what to make of the other one. It had a short tail, maybe 2″ long, and I couldn’t tell if the tail had any fur. The mice were approaching it with no reservations, so it must not be territorial, but it doesn’t look like any rat I’ve ever seen, and it’s way too big to be a mouse. Maybe something like a vole?
The Laotian rock rat or kha-nyou (Latin: Laonastes aenigmamus), sometimes called the “rat-squirrel”, is a rodent species of the Khammouan region of Laos. Upon their initial discovery, Jenkins and coauthors (2005) considered the Laotian rock rat to represent a completely new family. Jenkins et al. (2004) did not compare the specimens to known rodent fossils. After such a comparison, Dawson et al. (2006) were of the opinion that the Laotian rock rat belongs to a previously described family which had only been known from fossils, the Diatomyidae. The discovery of the Laotian rock rat means an 11 million-year gap exists in the fossil record where no diatomyids have been found. Mary Dawson described Laonastes as the “coelacanth of rodents”.
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