Fat-tailed gerbil

The fat tailed gerbil, also called the duprasi gerbil, is a rodent in the subfamily Gerbillinae and the only species in the genus Pachyuromys. It is a medium sized rodent about 10 centimeters long with a 5 centimeter tail, yellow fur with a dark grey base on its back and head, a white underside, and a distinctive fat, almost bald, club shaped tail that stores fat much as a camel's hump does. Wild individuals weigh 22 to 45 grams. It lives in the northern Sahara, in northwestern Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria, occupying sparsely vegetated sand sheets or rocky desert and digging burrows about a meter deep in hard sandy soil. In the wild it is solitary or loosely colonial and most active at dusk, communicating through scent marking from abdominal glands.