Verhoeven's Giant Tree Rat
Encyclopedia
Verhoeven's Giant Tree Rat (Papagomys theodorverhoeveni) is an extinct rat of subfamily Murinae
Murinae
The Old World rats and mice, part of the subfamily Murinae in the family Muridae, comprise at least 519 species. This subfamily is larger than all mammal families except the Cricetidae and Muridae, and is larger than all mammal orders except the bats and the remainder of the...

 that lived on Flores
Flores
Flores is one of the Lesser Sunda Islands, an island arc with an estimated area of 14,300 km² extending east from the Java island of Indonesia. The population was 1.831.000 in the 2010 census and the largest town is Maumere. Flores is Portuguese for "flowers".Flores is located east of Sumbawa...

 in Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

. It was assessed as being extinct in 1996. However, experts believed that it died out before 1500 AD. The species is known only from several subfossil fragments. It was named after Dutch priest Theodor Verhoeven
Theodor Verhoeven
Father Theodorus L. Verhoeven was a Dutch Catholic priest, missionary and amateur archaeologist who was responsible for significant paleontological discoveries in Indonesia of archaic stone tools in association with the fossils of stegodontids, or dwarf elephants, some 800,000 years old,...

.
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