Oriente Cave Rat - Boromys offella

The left lower jaw bone of Boromys offella from a publication in 1918 by Glover Morrill Allen (8 February 1879 - 14 February 1942).

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Heteropsomys (Boromys) offella (Miller 1916)

E.R. Hall (1981) treated Boromys as a subgenus of Heteropsomys, but on the basis of the morpholohy of the teeth and skull Woods (1984, 1989) recommended tentative generic rank for Boromys. (Nowak and Jones 1983; Nowak 1999)

The extinct West Indian spiny rat species can be described only on the basis of their skulls and teeth. The two species from the genus Boromys have a swelling on the bone over the end of the root of the upper incisors, a channel for the passage of a nerve on the floor of the antorbital foramen, and two inner en two outer reentrant fold on each of the cheek teeth. The incisors are coloured orange yellow. (Allen 1918; Allen 1942; Hall 1981) The two species of Boromys differ chiefly in size, with Boromys offella being larger than Boromys torrei (Allen 1917; Allen 1918; Allen 1942). No doubt there were some further differences in structure and habit that do not appear from the fragments at hand (Allen 1942).

This species occurred in Cuba and the Isla de la Juventud or 'Isle of Youth' (Allen 1918; Allen 1942; Turvey and Helgen 2008). Isla de la Juvetud was until 1978 known as Isla de Pinos or Isle of Pines (Wikipedia contributors 2011). Northing is known about its specific habitat.

Image: map showing the location of the islands of Cuba and Isle of Pines (in red), the former range of the Oriente Cave Rat or the Larger Cuban Spiny Rat. Created by Peter Maas for The Sixth Extinction website. This image has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Licence. This applies worldwide.

The Oriente Cave Rat was first discovered in excavations of an old village site at Maisi, Baracoa; hence it was probably used as a food animal by the natives (Allen 1942; Nowak 1999). Shortly after this discovery, a number of maxillae and mandibles were found in a cave at Limones, Cuba, and in similar situations in the Sierra de Casas, Isle of Pines, by Dr. Thomas Barbour and his associates. These remains may have been brought in by the now extinct giant barn owls. Other but "scanty material" representing the same animal was found at about the same time by Dr. H. E. Anthony (1919) in the course of excavations in caves at Daiquiri, in eastern Cuba, brought in probably by owls. (Allen 1942)

Barn owl pellets in fossiliferous cave deposits in the western part of Cuba, containing predated Oriente Cave Rats, other mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, were dated by radiocarbon dating at ¹⁴C 7864 ± 96 years BP and calibrated at 8993 - 8453 BP or 7044 - 6504 BCE (Jiménez Vázquez et al. 2005; Turvey 2009). However, this species is known from recent fossil deposits which also contain invasive rats. This suggest that it persisted until the modern era and that the extinction followed the arrival of European settlers around 1500 CE (Allen 1942; Turvey and Helgen 2008; Turvey 2009). Based on the remarkably fresh bones, some suggest it might have survived until the latter half of the nineteenth century (Allen 1942; Goodwin and Goodwin 1973; Nowak 1999).

Unknown, but the extinction likely followed the introduction of rats (Turvey and Helgen 2008).

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The genus Boromys is an extinct genus of Cuban rodents in the Echimyidae family or the Spiny Rats. It closest relative is the Torre's Cave Rat or Lesser Cuban Spiny Rat (Boromys torrei), which became extinct around the same time. The other West Indian Spiny Rats belonging to the subfamily are the Haitian Edible Rat (Brotomys contractus), the Hispaniolan Edible Rat (Brotomys voratus), and the genera Heteropsomys and Puestoricomys and are all extinct. The family Echimyidae has still several living members such as the Armored Rat (Hoplomys gymnurus), the Atlantic Bamboo Rat (Kannabateomys amblyonyx), the Amazon Bamboo Rat (Dactylomys dactylinus), the White-faced Spiny Tree-rat (Echimys chrysurus) and more.

Photo: A stuffed Armored Rat (Hoplomys gymnurus) taken at the National Museum of Natural History (Washington, D.C., United States). Photographed by 'ZeWrestler' on 8 November 2009. A full resolution version can be found on Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Oriente Cave Rat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Allen, G.M. (1918). Fossil mammals from Cuba. In: Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Harvard College, in Cambridge. 62(4):138-140. Available online: Internet Archive.

Allen, G.M. (1942). Extinct and vanishing mammals of the western hemisphere with the marine species of all the oceans. Special Publication No. 11. American Committee for International Wild Life Protection. The Intelligencer Printing Co. Lancaster, Pa. Available online: Internet Archive.

Anthony, H.E. (1919). Mammals collected in eastern Cuba in 1917, with descriptions of two new species. Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., vol. 41, pp.
625-643, 3 pis.

Hall, E.R. (1981). The mammals of North America. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 2 vols.

Jiménez Vázquez, O., Condis, M.M., and Elvis Garcí,a C. (2005). Vertebrados post-glaciales en un residuario fósil de Tyto alba scopoli (Aves: Tytonidae) en el occidente de Cuba. Revista Mexicana de Mastozoología 9, 85–112.

Miller, G. S., Jr. (1916). Bones of mammals from Indian sites in Cuba and Santo Domingo. Smithsonian misc. coll., 66(12): 8.

Nowak, R. M. [ed.] (1999). Walker's Mammals of the World, Sixth Edition, Volume II. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London. ISBN 0-8018-5789-9.

Nowak, R. M. and J.L. Paradiso [eds.] (1983). Walker's Mammals of the World, Fourth Edition, Volume II. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London. ISBN 0-8018-2525-3.

Turvey, S.T. (2009). Holocene mammal extinctions. In: Turvey, S.T.  (editor) (2009). Holocene extinctions. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Turvey, S. & Helgen, K. (2008). Boromys offella. In: IUCN (2010). IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2010.4. <www.iucnredlist.org>. Downloaded on 13 June 2011.

Wikipedia contributors (2011). 'Isla de la Juventud', Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 19 June 2011, 12:18 UTC, <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Isla_de_la_Juventud&oldid=435081093> [accessed 26 June 2011] .

Woods, C.A. (1984). Hystricognath rodents. In: Anderson, S. and J.K. Jones, Jr. [eds.] (1984). Orders and families of Recent mammals of the world. John Wiley & Sons, New York, pp. 389-446.

Woods, C.A. (1989). Endemic rodents of the West Indies: the end of a splendid isolation. In: Lidicker, W.Z. Jr. [ed.] (1989). Rodents: a world survey of species of conservation concern. Occas. Pap. Internatl. Union Conserv. Nat. Species Survival Comm. No 4: 11-19.