(family Diatomyidae) The discovery of a new family of living rodents was properly heralded as remarkable, but the story became ever more fascinating. A group of palaeontologists familiar with Asian fossil rodents compared the living Laonastes with several species of rodents of the extinct family Diatomyidae. They concluded that Laonastes was a living member of the family Diatomyidae. Laonaates is a particularly striking example of the Lazarus effect in recent mammals, whereby a taxon was formally thought to be extinct was rediscovered in the extent biota, in this case after a temporal gap of roughly 11 million years.

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