Arnhem Land rock rat

The Arnhem Land rock rat (Zyzomys maini), also called the Arnhem rock-rat and known by the Indigenous Australian name kodjperr, is a rodent of the family Muridae found only in the Top End region of the Northern Territory, Australia. Darrell Kitchener described it in 1989 during a revision of the genus Zyzomys; the holotype was an adult female collected among large boulders on an outlying sandstone mass near a creek at Ja Ja Billabong, and the species name honours Bert Main on his retirement from the zoology department of the University of Western Australia. The rat grows to about 15 cm long and weighs 100 to 150 g, with long whiskers, a swollen tail and a Roman nose. It is entirely terrestrial and nocturnal, eats mainly seeds, fruit and other plant matter, and caches large seeds or carries them to safe sites to eat. Breeding can occur all year, although females are rarely pregnant late in the dry season. It is endemic to the sandstone massif of western Arnhem Land, where patches of monsoonal rainforest are its preferred vegetation and the fragmented population occupies an estimated 100 to 1,000 square kilometres. The IUCN lists it as near threatened and the population is in decline, with about 30 percent in Kakadu National Park.