viscacha
- noun
- /vɪˈskɑːtʃə/
- In the highlands of Argentina, a group of viscacha live together in their burrows, known for their soft fur and social nature.
- golden viscacha
- viscacha rat
- plains viscacha
Examples
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On one of my field trips, I had hoped to find a little-known rodent called the plains or red viscacha rat (Tympanoctomys barrerae).
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The next-to-the-last trap held an animal—a viscacha rat, unlike any I had ever seen.
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The golden viscacha rat is an extremely rare species, occurring over less than ten square miles of salt desert.
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But the plains viscacha rat had not been found again in four decades, and only a few museum specimens were available for study.
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Surprisingly, however, each mound or set of mounds houses only one plains viscacha rat.
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And like the North American kangaroo rat and the North African fat sand rat, the South American plains viscacha rat also proved to have kidneys that produce highly concentrated urine.
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Like the plains viscacha rat, it has a pair of little toothlike brushes behind its upper incisors, but they are less pronounced and less stiff than they are in the plains species.
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Golden viscacha rat (Pipanacoctomys aureus) was discovered by the author and his colleagues in the Bolsón de Pipanaco.
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Bundle of bristles (left), here shown fifteen times natural size, is one of a pair of such bundles on the mouth of the plains viscacha rat (Tympanoctomys barrerae) of western Argentina (right).
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After our work with the plains viscacha rat, I became convinced that the vast salt flats scattered throughout the deserts and arid thorn forests of northern Argentina could harbor other salt-pan specialists.
Academic text (2003)
Synonyms
1
9.9
A large rodent like a chinchilla with long whiskers and a bushy tail that lives in burrows in South America
Compounds
A small animal like a rabbit that lives on rocky mountain slopes in Chile and Peru
Surface Forms
Etymology
Viscacha comes from Quechua, an Andean language, where a similar word wisk'acha meant 'a kind of rodent'. Because Spanish kept that local name and English borrowed it, the word still names this soft-furred, burrowing South American rodent today.