The skull of a black rat (right) compared with a fairly complete skull of one of Timor's other extinct giant rats (left). The giant rat shown here isn't the biggest of the extinct rats ...

The black rat snake goes by many names, including the black chicken snake, black Coluber, black pilot snake, and the eastern ...

Rats and rat fleas in many foreign ports are at times infected with the plague, an extraordinarily ugly disease that occurs in several forms, of which the bubonic, the Black Death of the Middle ...

Photo: Rat Receiving Station set up as part of the ... Bubonic plague, or "the black death," had raged throughout Europe and Asia over the past centuries. In the twentieth century, it came to ...