‘Lost’ for 30 Years, This Giant Woolly Rat Just Showed Up in the Wild

The trend for extinct or thought-to-be-lost creatures might be to revive them, but it’s undeniably cooler to actually prove that they still exist. And the rediscovered giant woolly rat is a creature that’s as glorious as it is natural.

In a paper published in April in Mammalia, Czech researcher František Vejmělka shares the first-ever photographs of Mallmys istapantap, or the subalpine woolly rat—an elusive creature that has existed in scientific limbo for decades. Its 1989 registration…