Transcription
It's 1996 and a biologist named Robert Timonss is doing field work in Laos. He takes a break for lunch. He goes to an open air market. As he's checking out the meat and the produce, he notices something unusual for sale. It's a long whiskered rodent.
These rodents are unlike anything Timonss has ever seen before. So he spends about 6 cents to buy two of them, but not for dinner because he's convinced that there is something unusual about them. He starts calling them Le Oceanian rock rats and he sends them to the Natural History Museum in London so they can take a closer look.
Something about this strange creature looks very familiar.
Photos of the rodent look very similar to a skull that the museum has in their collection from an animal that's been extinct for 11 million years.
They do a side-by-side comparison of the living rodent skull with the extinct skull in their collection. And when they look at them side by side, they find a perfect match.
Robert Timmons didn't discover a brand new species. He just stumbled upon one that we thought was long gone.