Year of the Rat

It is a touchy use of the word "discovered" when a rodent
that Laotians routinely eat is purchased at a market and then declared
to be a new species. Just think of the debate over saying America was
discovered by a European who stumbled over it 12,000 years after humans
first settled there. But until field researchers found the animal on
sale in Thakhet, and lab analysts identified it as a separate species,
the foot-long critter that Laotians call kha-nyou, or rock rat, didn’t
have a scientific name.

from the New York Times