Locals call it the kha-nyou and enjoy it roasted on a skewer.
But when scientists spotted the squirrel-like rodent at a Laotian food market two years ago, they called it a species previously unknown to science.
Now new DNA analysis confirms that the Laotian rock rat is a "living fossil" that belongs to a family of rodents thought to have gone extinct 11 million years ago.
Researchers at first believed the rare Asian species was the only representative of an entirely new family of rodents.
Instead the rock rat is part of a family that split from the rest of the more than 1,500 species of modern-day rodents about 44 million years ago, the new gene study says.
"It's not exactly a fossil," lead study author Dorothée Huchon of Israel's Tel Aviv University, said of the rock rat. "It hasn't stopped evolving."
Rodent Family Tree
Despite its name, the rock rat belongs a rodent group that includes guinea pigs and porcupines and is not as closely related to rats as it is to those animals.
The species is distinguished by its black coat, bushy tail, and ducklike waddle.
The rock rat's closest living relative is the gundi, a rodent found only in Africa with a guinea piglike body and a ratlike head.
The new genetic study bolsters a previous study of fossil rodents published last year in the journal Science.
The new report appears this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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