Credit: QUEEN'S UNIV. BELFAST/AFP PHOTO

Zoologists have had the Pied Piper's knack of finding rodents and their ilk this week. This greater white-toothed shrew (Crocidura russula) was discovered in Ireland after biologists were alerted to owl pellets containing large shrew skulls. The large creature — well, larger than its native Irish cousins such as the pygmy shrew — probably arrived on the island as a stowaway on a ship from North Africa or continental Europe, where it is usually found. Several have now been found in Tipperary and Limerick.

Also reported this week, was the extraordinary find by biologists exploring the mossy mountain forests of Luzon island in the Philippines: a dwarf cloud rat. The species had not been seen since its 1896 discovery and naming by a British biologist. Sadly the reddish-brown rat was dead when spotted high in the canopy of Mount Pulag, the country's second-highest peak. “The cloud rats are one of the most spectacular cases of adaptive radiation by mammals anywhere in the world,” says co-discoverer Lawrence Heaney of the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.