How The Wild Hamster Was Tamed
Its name in Arabic translates roughly as "Mr. Saddlebags." Thanks to Aharoni, the little rodent with the big cheeks can now be found in many grade-school classrooms, running on a little wheel in a little cage.
That's right. Aharoni's big find was the hamster.
Of course, Aharoni didn't set out looking for a schoolchild's pet, biologist Rob Dunn tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer. Dunn, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, wrote about the hamster's discovery in a recent article on Smithsonian.com.
One of Aharoni's colleagues, Saul Adler, thought the animal might be similar enough to humans to use for medical research. "Aharoni saw this as a chance to both to discover this organism in the wild and to bring them back to Adler so he could make major discoveries about humans," Dunn says.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/04/10/135268583/how-the-wild-hamster-was-tamed?ft=1&f=1007