Don’t worry about meeting it on the street, though: The rat, which is believed to belong to the genus Mallomys, lives only in the area of the volcano. It’s thought to be one of the biggest in the world, and it’s a “true rat, the same kind you find in the city sewers,” mammalogist Kristofer Helgen told the BBC. The 32-inch-long beast weighed more than 3 pounds and showed no fear of humans.
But that’s tiny compared to the Bosavi woolly rat, which was discovered in 2009 by a BBC expedition to an extinct volcano in Papua New Guinea. If a rat lives near a steady food source, like a dumpster, it can grow to be 20 inches long and weigh 2 pounds. On average, the brown rat is about 16 inches long (including its tail) and weighs less than a pound. According to one study, rats can lift objects that weigh nearly a pound-more than the average rat’s body weight. With a running start, rats add another foot to their leaps-which, according to Conniff, is equivalent to a person jumping on top of a garage. Rats are also phenomenal jumpers they can leap 2 feet in the air from a standing position. Getting down isn't a problem, either: A rat can fall 50 feet and land on its feet without injuries. The long claws on a rat’s feet allow it to scale brick or cement walls with Spider-man-like ease. "The membrane over the bone is quite sensitive, and it was grinding its teeth back and forth. Frantz told Richard Conniff in his book Rats! The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. "It put its teeth straight through my index finger," Stephen C.
Their jaws are built like an alligator’s and can exert as much as 7000 pounds of force per square inch-which means their teeth can easily slice down to human bone, as one state biologist in New York discovered when he picked up an errant lab rat with his hand. Rats will usually only bite when cornered. Their front teeth are long-they grow about 5 inches every year-and also very sharp, with a nifty self-sharpening feature: The edges of the upper and lower teeth rub against each other, having the effect of a knife on a whetstone. Rats can chomp through thick wood, metal pipes, brick walls, and cement. Rats can chew their way through almost anything. Its ribs are hinged at the spineĪnd can fold down like an umbrella, which means that any hole that’s big enough for a rat’s head is big enough for the rest of him. Rats can squeeze through extremely small holes.Ī rat can squeeze through a hole the size of a quarter, thanks to its collapsible skeleton. rattus)-will fill you with terror, or awe, or perhaps both. Norway rats, Rattus norvegicus) and black rats (a.k.a. These facts about the two kinds of rats that love to live around people-brown rats (a.k.a. But let’s face it: They are also the stuff of nightmares. There is much to admire about rats-they are smart, surprisingly well-groomed, and they make excellent pets. One glimpse of a beady-eyed, yellow-toothed rat scuttling across the basement floor or darting down a city sidewalk is enough to make most people scream. Rats are up there with snakes and spiders when it comes scaring the pants off people.
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