Ansorge's brush-furred rat

Ansorge's brush-furred rat, Lophuromys ansorgei, is a species of rodent in the family Muridae. It was identified in 1896 by William Edward de Winton, with the first specimen recorded at Mumias in Nyanza Province. For most of the following century it was widely treated as a form of Lophuromys sikapusi, until a 2000 study in the Bulletin of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences by Walter Verheyen, Theo Dierckx and Jan Hulselmans argued that it is a distinct species. Its distribution is not fully known. That study places it in Africa, from the lower reaches of the Congo River and the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Uganda, western Kenya and northern Tanzania, while leaving open whether the species is continuous along the rim of the Congolese Central Forest Block or the lower Congo range is only a historical one.