I thought I’d seen it all after six months in Southeast Asia—tree rats, squat toilets, zipline-only treehouses, Komodo dragons, and monkeys with a taste for laundry detergent. Then I landed in Nepal, ...

The Vangunu giant rat is a species that exists only on one of the Solomon Islands. Local residents had deep knowledge of the rat, which researchers had never seen alive. With the help of the ...