This Tiny Adorable Critter Is Half Kangaroo, Half Velociraptor

This bouncing jerboa is so cute that I just had four, maybe five heart attacks.

Kangaroos are played out. I mean, they’re great and all, and I say that not just because they scare me a bit, but they’re just so 2014. Hopping around, eating grass, kickboxing the tar out of each other. I’m over it. Mostly because another group of perfectly good creatures is hopping around in a remarkably similar manner, only much more adorably: the 30-odd species of achingly cute, bipedal jerboa, rodents with all the kangaroo’s legs and none of the crummy attitude.

Just look at that thing. The top part looks enough like a mouse, but those legs. What’s going on there? (To be clear, jerboas do have two other limbs like any other rodent, but they’re tiny and tucked against the face and for the love of God how is it possible that everything about this creature is so adorable?)

Well, though it may look like it, the knees are not in fact inverted. The jerboa’s knee is actually hard to make out, butting up against its torso. That extremely long section is called the cannon bone, and it’s made up fused metatarsal bones—the longest ones in the center of your foot. The tiny bits of the foot that actually make contact with the ground are the toes, so the jerboa in fact spends its life tiptoeing around. Some species even look like they’re wearing shoes, on account of the tufts of hair on their toes. Those stiff fibers act a bit like snowshoes, giving the rodent some extra purchase in the sandy deserts they call home, places like North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and Asia.

The elongated legs bestow the jerboa with incredible speed and leaping abilities, like a tiny kangaroo on amphetamines. “This is an animal that’s about the size of your fist,” says biomechanist Talia Moore of Harvard University, who studies their locomotion, “yet there have been reports that some species can easily hop over six feet.”

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  That long, elegant tail also probably plays a role in balance. Moore and other researchers need to do more work to determine exactly what’s going on, but by manipulating its tail, the jerboa can likely help stabilize itself as it’s speeding around the desert. And it’s not the only one: Velociraptors likely used their tails in the same way. (Interestingly, Moore did research as an undergrad on lizard and velociraptor locomotion, showing just how important a tail is for orientation in those creatures. Double interestingly, she says that the folks who recently built a jerboa robot used her undergrad work as a reference.)

Leading the research into the utility of jerboa tails was a certain Frenchman, who, unrestrained by the moral considerations of modern science, went a bit too far in his experiments. “There have been historical observations where in the 1800s this cruel Frenchman cut off a jerboa’s tail, and it just wasn’t able to do anything,” says Moore. “It couldn’t even sit up, it couldn’t jump around, it was just a pathetic, sad jerboa.”

The stunt was not … well received. “There are multiple publications from around 1835,” Moore adds, “where they’re all talking about this ‘cruel Frenchman.’ Those exact words.” One naturalist oh-so-eloquently chastised the mutilator: “We would remind such persons, that although the Creator has given us the faculties, and permits us to use them in studying his works, we have no right to violate the common feelings of humanity towards his creatures.”

Jerboas are even adorable in the lab. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be adorable in a lab?

Alright, now that that’s out of the way, we can get back to the many additional wonders of the jerboas. They’re vegetarians, specifically crepuscular vegetarians, meaning they forage at twilight, mainly for seeds. And seeds not only bestow them with requisite nutrition but also water, so much so that they never need to drink.

Here’s the problem, though: Jerboas share not only a habitat with the gerbil (yes, it still exists in the wild, outside the clutches of over-enthusiastic 5-year-olds), but a niche as well, for gerbils love them some seeds too. And it can be problematic for two species to compete over the same limited resource—the desert isn’t exactly overflowing with plants and seeds.

Both species have another serious problem on their hands in the form of birds of prey. Yet while the gerbil tends to hang out in the relative safety of shrubbery, the jerboa instead opts to take its chances out in the open. But why? Well, for the jerboa and gerbil, the problems of competition and predation are intertwined.

Consider how predatory birds hunt: They have one shot at pinpointing a moving target and diving in. “If you think about it,” Moore says, “nocturnal birds of prey have just one single strike that they have to commit to, they have to predict where their prey animal is going and then meet up with them there. And so if the jerboa does something that’s unpredictable, like jump straight up or jump in a zig zag, it makes it really difficult for the birds of prey to plot an effective intercept course.”

Even adorable with flash! Do you have any idea how hard it is to be adorable with a flash?

A gerbil simply isn’t equipped to deal with this out in the open. If a predator is on its tail, it’s pretty much just full steam straight ahead back to its burrow. This, therefore, limits the gerbil in its foraging. It’s forced to stick to shelter underneath a bush, preferably somewhere close to its burrow.

Eff that noise, says the jerboa. It bravely ventures way out into the world (Moore usually finds them chilling on dirt roads). Here it roots around for seeds with eyes on the sky. Should a predator swoop in, it can tear away, zig-zagging and praying that the raptor miscalculates its strike.

Thus the gerbil and jerboa can occupy the same niche without competing: They never really run up against each other because they’re exploring different microhabitats. Indeed, if you put a jerboa and a gerbil in a cage, they won’t mind each other one bit, not exactly what you’d expect if two different species were used to fighting over resources in the wild.

Read more at Wired Science