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NarrativeWikipediaarticle
Traits & measurements2 literature sources8 traits
Occurrence & distributionGBIF · PBDB2 records
Deep timePBDB1 fossils
01Narrative
Noronhomys vespuccii, also known as Vespucci's rodent,Musser and Carleton, 2005, p. 1136 is an extinct rat species from the islands of Fernando de Noronha off northeastern Brazil. Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci may have seen it on a visit to Fernando de Noronha in 1503, but it subsequently became extinct, perhaps because of the exotic rats and mice introduced by the first explorers of the island. Numerous but fragmentary fossil remains of the animal, of uncertain but probably Holocene age, were discovered in 1973 and described in 1999. Noronhomys vespuccii was a fairly large rodent, larger than the black rat (Rattus rattus). A member of the family Cricetidae and subfamily Sigmodontinae, it shares several distinctive characters with Holochilus and related genera within the tribe Oryzomyini, including high-crowned molars with simplified crown features and the presence of several ridges on the skull which help anchor the chewing muscles. Although a suite of traits suggest that Holochilus is its closest relative, it is distinctive in many ways and is therefore classified in a separate genus, Noronhomys. Its close relatives, including Holochilus and Lundomys, are adapted to a semiaquatic lifestyle, spending much of their time in the water, but features of the Noronhomys bones suggest that it lost its semiaquatic lifestyle after arrival at its remote island.
No narrative description available for this taxon yet.
How far back this lineage goes — and how we know. Everything here is measured in Ma, short for “mega-annum”: millions of years ago. The chart reads left to right like a calendar of the Earth, from the deep past on the left to today at the right edgetop to bottom like a core drilled through the Earth, from the deep past at the top down to today at the bottom.
At a glance
Fossil range0.01–0 Ma Pleistocene, Holocene
Dated fossil finds1
StatusExtinct no longer alive anywhere
When this lineage existed
How to read this: the coloured strip along the bottomdown the left is the geological calendar — the standard epochs (Pliocene, Pleistocene…) every museum uses, shown so you can see which chapter of Earth's history this lineage lived in. This lineage is a young one, so the strip is zoomed in to epochs — the finer subdivisions inside a period. The solid bar is the fossil range: the span between the oldest and the youngest fossil that palaeontologists have assigned to Noronhomys vespuccii. Above itBeside it, each dot is one dated fossil find — few enough to count, so they are drawn individually rather than as a graph.
fossil range (PBDB) †each dot = one dated find
Extinct — but the bar still reaches today. PBDB flags this lineage as extinct, yet its fossil range ends at 0 Ma — the present day. Both cannot be literally true. This is what it looks like when the youngest fossils fall inside the most recent slice of the time scale: the endpoint rounds to “today” rather than to the actual disappearance, which may be far too recent for an axis measured in millions of years to resolve. Read the young end of the bar (and the †) as the limit of the dated record, not as the date it died out.
How it livedPBDB
Environmentterrestrial
Life habitground dwelling
Dietherbivore
Motilityactively mobile
Compositionhydroxyapatite
Reproductionviviparous
08Occurrence & distribution
Record type2 records
Museum / vouchered1
Fossil1
Range
Area of Occupancy AOO4 km²
Museum / Voucheredphysical evidence
Backed by a physical specimen — a herbarium sheet, sample or voucher held in a collection. “Vouchered” means supported by material evidence, not just an observation.
