One-ton Rat once roamed the Earth

[Hum]

You'd be hard-pressed to find a chair big enough on which to jump to escape this fellow.

Standing five-foot high at the shoulders and weighing almost a ton, it was the largest rodent ever to scuttle across the Earth and 14 times bigger than any alive today.

It lived in the forests of South America four million years ago, dodging attacks from giant meat-eating birds and sabre-toothed cats.

According to the scientists who have examined its skull, it looked liked a cross between a guinea pig and a beaver.

The broken skull was found in a boulder which fell away from a cliff in the San Jose region of Uruguay and was stored for many years in the Montevideo national history museum without anyone realising its importance.

It was only when the museum's fossil expert Dr Ernesto Blanco took a close look last year that he discovered it belonged to a creature never seen before.

Dr Blanco - who named the animal Josephoartigasia monesi - calculated that it weighed around a ton, or 157 stone.

"We only have the skull, so it is not possible to be certain, but looking at other large rodents, I guess that it was three metres long from the tip of its nose to the end of its very short tail," he said.

The jaws would have been big enough to hold a small animal, but its tastes apparently ran to fruit and vegetables, ground down with ever-growing teeth.

The enormous incisors extending four inches from its gums were probably used as weapons against predators, or for processing wood like a modern-day beaver does, according to Dr Blanco, who reported the findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Because of its size, its legs would have been under huge strain and it would have needed to stand more like a cow or sheep than a mouse.

Rodents first appeared around 40 to 50 million years ago. The largest living today is the eight stone capybara from South America, while the smallest is Pakistan's inch-long pygmy jerboa.

Previously, the largest prehistoric rodent was a 118-stone monster discovered in Venezuela in 2000, which lived eight million years ago.

Dr Blanco said of this find: "It is a very impressive fossil. From my point of view, it is very beautiful."

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