''Megalomys desmarestii'', also known as the Martinique muskrat,Watts, 1990, p. 528 Desmarest's pilorie,Musser and Carleton, 2005 or the Martinique giant rice rat, is an extinct

rice rat Oryzomyini is a tribe of rodents in the subfamily Sigmodontinae of the family Cricetidae. It includes about 120 species in about thirty genera,Weksler et al., 2006, table 1 distributed from the eastern United States to the southernmost parts of S ...

from

Martinique Martinique ( , ; gcf, label=Martinican Creole, Matinik or ; Kalinago: or ) is an island and an overseas department/region and single territorial collectivity of France. An integral part of the French Republic, Martinique is located in ...

in the Caribbean.

Description

It was among the largest

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...

of West Indian rice rat, as big as a

cat The cat (''Felis catus'') is a domestic species of small carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species in the family Felidae and is commonly referred to as the domestic cat or house cat to distinguish it from the wild members of ...

, and was one of the first Caribbean mammals to become extinct during the 20th century. It may have been aquatic, as it was known to escape into the sea when pursued by predators, but it never swam away from the island. Megalomys desmarestii Gervais

Extinction

It was common on Martinique until the end of the 19th century, when attempts were made to exterminate it because it was considered to be a pest in the island's coconut plantations. It was also hunted for food; however, due to a strong musky odor, cooking required people to singe off its hair, air out the body overnight and boil it in two batches of water. On 8 May 1902, the

volcano A volcano is a rupture in the Crust (geology), crust of a Planet#Planetary-mass objects, planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and volcanic gas, gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. On Ear ...

Mount Pelée Mount Pelée or Mont Pelée ( ; french: Montagne Pelée, ; gcf, label=Antillean Creole, Montann Pèlé, meaning "bald mountain" or "peeled mountain") is an active volcano at the northern end of Martinique, an island and French overseas departmen ...

erupted, completely destroying the island's principal city of Saint-Pierre. It has been speculated that the rice rat became extinct then or during a later eruption in 1902, but predation by introduced

mongoose A mongoose is a small terrestrial carnivorous mammal belonging to the family Herpestidae. This family is currently split into two subfamilies, the Herpestinae and the Mungotinae. The Herpestinae comprises 23 living species that are native to so ...

s is more likely to have been the primary cause of its extinction.

References

Literature cited

*Flannery, T. and Schouten, P. 2001. ''A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World's Extinct Animals''. Atlantic Monthly Press, New York. *Musser, G.G. and Carleton, M.D. 2005. Superfamily Muroidea. Pp. 894–1531 in Wilson, D.E. and Reeder, D.M. (eds.)
''Mammal Species of the World: a taxonomic and geographic reference''. 3rd ed
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2 vols., 2142 pp. *Turvey, S. and Helgen, K. 2008. . In: IUCN 2009. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2009.2.
www.iucnredlist.org
. Downloaded on November 15, 2009. *Watts, David. 1990. ''The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture, and Environmental Change Since 1492''. Cambridge University Press Extinct rodents Rodent extinctions since 1500 Endemic fauna of Martinique Megalomys Mammals described in 1829 Taxa named by Johann Baptist Fischer Mammals of the Caribbean {{Sigmodontinae-stub