A Guinea Pig No Cage Would Hold

A Guinea Pig No Cage Would Hold

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - This was one guinea pig no one would have kept in a cage. The fossil of a 1,500-pound animal, 9 feet long, belonged to a rodent -- an early ancestor of modern guinea pigs, researchers reported. Living 8 million years ago in what is now Venezuela, the animal would have grazed and from a distance would have resembled a buffalo, the researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Found in a remote area in 2000, the fossil mystified scientists who finally determined it was a specimen of Phoberomys pattersoni.

"Imagine a weird guinea pig but huge, with a long tail for balancing on its hind legs and continuously growing teeth," research team leader Marcelo Sanchez-Villagra of the University of Tubingen in Germany said in a statement.

At the time the area, 250 miles west of Caracas, was lush, with monster turtles, huge crocodiles and giant catfish in the rivers.

"Phoberomys is reported to be the largest rodent that ever existed," Sanchez-Villagra and colleagues in Venezuela and the United States wrote in the report.