“Cute” fluffy, bushy tailed rats twice the size of grey squirrels once roamed Earth thousands of years ago, scientists have discovered.
The fossilised remains of this giant cloud rat species were dredged up in a series of caves in the Philippines, after the rodent went extinct a few thousand years ago.
Larry Heaney, curator of mammals at the Field Museum in Chicago, said: “The bigger ones would have looked almost like a woodchuck [groundhog] with a squirrel tail.
“Cloud rats eat plants, and they’ve got great big pot bellies that allow…
