"To be a rodent, or not to be a rodent. That is the question."
William Shakespeare's Guinea Pig (the lesser known Whilliam Haykespeare), pondered this same question while his owner was writing his famous play, Hamlet.
So too, have biologists been temporarilypuzzled by how to classify this fascinating creature. Is it a rodent? Or could it be descended from the ancestor of a hippopotamus?!
If you are not familiar with this fascinating bit of taxonomy in-fighting, scurry on, MacDuff ... I mean, dear readers!
For a brief time beginning in June of 1996, guinea pigs were declared to be "non-rodents" by researchers in Italy and Sweden. The research paper, published in the June 13, 1996 issue of Nature, created a scientific firestorm of "epig" proportions!
The heated debate raged on for quite a while, with scathing criticism of the original paper. Finally, there was a formal rebuttal, published the following year. See below.
