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Science 19 September 2003:
Vol. 301. no. 5640, pp. 1678 - 1679
DOI: 10.1126/science.1090964
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Perspectives

Also see the archival list of Science's Compass: Enhanced Perspectives

EVOLUTION:
Enhanced: A Rodent as Big as a Buffalo

R. McNeill Alexander

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 (Sánchez-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.

The author is in the Department of Pure and Applied Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. E-mail: r.m.alexander{at}leeds.ac.uk

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)