The greater part of expected mammalian extinctions will be of smaller-bodied mammals, including rats which are more generally known only as pests and carriers of pathogens. We address the long-tailed nesokia rat, which is among the least studied Palaearctic mammals. The species is known from merely five specimens, collected between March 1974 and January 1977 within a radius of 30 km around Qurna inside the seasonally flooded Mesopotamian marshes in southern Iraq. In the 1990s, this extensive aquatic habitat has been deliberately reduced to <15% of its original area and the IUCN expressed fear that such a disaster “almost certainly” caused the extinction of the long-tailed nesokia. Although the interventions after 2003 reversed the shrinking trend and marshes started to expand, the continuous presence of the long-tailed nesokia could not be unambiguously confirmed. We provide meagre evidence suggesting that the rat might be still present in the marshes. Next, our habitat modelling shows that the area of the long-tailed nesokia might be more extensive than expected with a highly suitable habitat covering 15,650 km 2 of Mesopotamian marshland in Iraq (between Basra and Salah Ad Din provinces) and the Hawizeh Marshes in the adjacent Iranian Khuzestan.

中文翻译：

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来自伊甸园的一只被遗忘的啮齿动物：美索不达米亚沼泽中那只长尾的尼古拉斯老鼠到底发生了什么？

预期的哺乳动物灭绝的绝大部分将是身体较小的哺乳动物，包括更通常仅被称为害虫和病原体携带者的大鼠。我们研究了长尾的neosokia大鼠，它是研究最少的古北极哺乳动物之一。该物种仅从1974年3月至1977年1月之间在Qurna附近30公里半径内收集的五个标本中得知，该地区位于伊拉克南部季节性泛滥的美索不达米亚沼泽中。在1990年代，有意将这种广泛的水生生境减少到其原始面积的15％以下，自然保护联盟表示担心这种灾难“几乎可以肯定”会导致长尾尼古拉斯灭绝。尽管2003年以后的干预措施扭转了萎缩趋势，沼泽开始扩大，不能明确地确认长尾尼古丁的持续存在。我们提供的证据很少，暗示大鼠可能仍存在于沼泽地中。接下来，我们的栖息地建模表明，长尾的纳斯诺克的面积可能比预期的要广泛，因为高度合适的栖息地覆盖了伊拉克的美索不达米亚沼泽地15,650 km 2（在巴士拉和萨拉赫丁市之间）和哈维兹沼泽地。邻近伊朗的胡兹斯坦。