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When he wasn’t eating sleek brown rodents himself — probably the twenty pound agouti, which Darwin regarded as “the very best meat I ever tasted” — or collecting small tuco-tuco rodents as pets, the naturalist made important rodent fossil discoveries in Argentina.

Other specimens belonged to an extinct species of tuco-tuco which grew as large as current-day capybaras.

Then there’s the tuco-tuco, which Darwin described on his travels as “A curious, small animal…tucotucos appear…to be gregarious…This animal is universally known by a very peculiar noise…A person the first time he hears it is much surprised.”

Impressed by her earlier work regarding another species, scientists named a newly discovered type of gopher-like rodent after her: Erika’s tuco-tuco, aka Ctenomys erikacuellarae.

The gopher-like tuco-tuco is native to Bolivia.