Murid

The theory of faunal dominance holds that while evolution occurs everywhere, certain land masses generate disproportionately more terrestrial and aquatic groups, such as the familiar murid rodents and ranid frogs, which are able to colonize and dominate other land masses.

Calhoun, an endlessly inventive designer of experiments, built an enclosure outfitted with rat apartments and partitioned the pen into connected “neighborhoods,” creating a murid arcadia that he could observe at his leisure.

Given how hard it is to study urban rats, we know remarkably little about them; we know more about moose in the Yukon than we do about my murid neighbors in New York.

Near-synonyms: mouse, rat

And when Russian troops attacked breakaway Chechnya in the early 1990s, separatist fighters were often seen performing the stirring ritual the zikr, during which murids dance in a circle while crying hypnotic chants.