To investigate, Bishop and his colleagues turned to a sort of evolutionary second cousin of the kangaroo, a rat-looking creature called the musky rat-kangaroo. BISHOP: It's kind of stocky ...

The desert rat-kangaroo (Caloprymnus campestris), a small, hopping marsupial believed to be extinct since 1994, may still be hiding in the vast and harsh Sturt Stony Desert of Australia.