to as the "giant rat of Sumatra" in an article in The New York Times. In a lecture delivered in 1994 and published online in 2014, Holmesian Alan Saunders argued that a giant Sumatran rat species was being used by the villain Culverton Smith as the carrier of the disease known as Tapanuli Fever, a feature of Doyle's "The Adventure of the Dying Detective". (Tapanuli is an administrative district of North West Sumatra; the highly lethal infectious disease is also known as Melioidosis; it is caused by the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei.) Saunders identified the rat as the Large Sumatran Bamboo Rat (Rhizomys sumatrensis); this species can reach lengths of nearly 50 cm with a 20 cm tail, and weigh up to 4 kilos (8.8 lbs); it is in real life a carrier of the disease-causing mold, Penicillium marneffei, which can also be lethal. A new species in the Woolly Rat (Mallomys) genus was discovered in 2007 in the Foja Mountains of Papua; it weighs 1.4 kilograms (3.1 lb) and has been compared to Holmes's animal. In 2015, the discovery of fossils of "seven new species of giant rat", including the "largest rat ever" on the island of East Timor was announced. The biggest of these Coryphomys rats was described as weighing "5 kilos (11 pounds), the size of a small dog," and was referred to as the "Giant Rat" in news stories. In Sherlockiana A number of authors of Sherlockiana have endeavoured to supply the missing adventure of the giant rat of Sumatra, either in non-canonical Holmesian fiction, or as references to the tale in other fictional settings: In "The Giant Rat of Sumatra," an episode of the radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes written by Edith Meiser, and first broadcast on 1 March 1942, Professor Moriarty arranges for the titular rodent, infected with bubonic plague, to be transported to England on board the Matilda Briggs. This episode is apparently lost, but is described in some detail by Jim Harmon in his book The Great Radio Heroes. In The Spider Woman (1944), Nigel Bruce's Watson briefly reflects on the Giant Rat of Sumatra when looking through a scrapbook of old cases. In Pursuit to Algiers (1945), a Holmes film starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, Watson tells the story of the Giant Rat of Sumatra to an audience on board a ship. The Tale of the Giant Rat