Loring's rat

Loring's rat, Thallomys loringi, is a species of rodent in the family Muridae found in Kenya and Tanzania. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical dry forests, dry savanna and subtropical or tropical dry shrubland. The species is named for John Alden Loring, who captured the holotype during the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition. Edmund Heller first described it and placed it in the genus Thamnomys; in 1923 Oldfield Thomas and Martin Hinton moved it to the genus Thallomys. It was afterwards treated as a subspecies of either Thallomys nigricauda, as Ned Hollister, Glover Morrill Allen and John Ellerman each had it, or of Thallomys damarensis, as Francis Petter had it. With the 1993 second edition of Mammal Species of the World, which follows the classification of Guy Musser and Carleton, it is again regarded as a species in its own right.