Most people do not like discovering mice, unless you are a rodent researcher. Scientists from the Australian National University say they have uncovered the first new species of mice this century. They say the breakthrough has been decades in the making.
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00:00 Until our recent work, we believe that the delicate mouse was distributed across a really
00:06 wide range of northern Australia.
00:08 Three types of delicate mice in as many states.
00:12 With researchers discovering the elusive Western delicate mouse and the Eastern delicate mouse.
00:17 Advancements in technology helping to find the first new native rodents this century.
00:23 We looked at their genomics, their genetics and we found that they're very genetically
00:27 different.
00:28 They've also got very different sperm morphologies which probably means that they're reproductively
00:32 different from each other so they can't mate together.
00:35 It's a mission Fred Ford first began in the 1990s using samples from as far back as 1857.
00:42 We had a lot of pieces of evidence that these things were different species and we'd identified
00:46 that they most probably were and then the recent works used more up to date methods
00:52 and techniques that have allowed us to really confirm that these are different species.
00:57 Rodents get a bit of a bad rap but our native species are nothing like the invasive species
01:01 that we often consider as pests in our lives.
01:05 Native rodents are really sweet and docile and really important parts of our ecosystem.
01:10 The rate at which we're able to learn new things with new genomic technologies is really
01:13 exciting for us and so it's one of those places where it's really been a game changer for
01:17 conservation.
01:18 A scientific discovery a quarter of a century in the making.
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