Hutias are a strange group of rodents living on various islands of the Caribbean. Although big, and sometimes looking a little plump, they’re active climbers and spend a considerable amount of their lives in trees. They look almost like a cross between a squirrel and a beaver, but are only distantly related to either. Instead, these rodents are in the Cavimorpha group that includes many unusual rodents of the Americas, such as capybaras, guinea pigs and spiny rats. The largest of all the hutias is Desmarest’s hutia (Capromys pilorides), found only in Cuba. A new study now shows, based on museum specimens, that the Cuban species is actually two distinct species: Desmarest’s hutia on the eastern part of Cuba, and the western conga hutia (Capromys geayi) on the western side. “We used ancient DNA research methods to investigate the evolutionary relationships between historically old specimens of hutias that had been collected from Cuba in the 19th century, and were now in the collections of museums in Europe,” says study co-author Samuel Turvey, a professor at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and expert on Caribbean mammals, both alive and extinct. “These included specimens that had originally been named as distinct species by zoologists over a century ago, but had since been largely forgotten.” DNA evidence showed that these two animals split around 1.75 million years ago, long before humans arrived in what is today the Americas. For millions of years, a large, deep-water channel split Cuba into two distinct parts, likely keeping…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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