The naked mole rat is a small social burrowing rodent native to the horn of Africa. Known mainly for being astonishingly ugly (Kim Possible cartoon version excepted), naked mole rats are remarkable little creatures, and you can read more about them here:
Naked mole rat
Growing up, one of my favorite skits I remember from Bill Nye the Science Guy is relevant to the current discussion:
Naked mole rats fit awkwardly into the typical classification scheme that defines what it is to be a mammal. In many ways, they behave more like giant ants with endoskeletons than like moles or rats. They're eusocial, forming large colonies with a single reproductive queen and many sterile female workers, have virtually no hair (hence the descriptor "naked"), and are content to let their body temperature rise and fall with their surroundings as though they're bucktoothed burrowing lizards. That said, their evolutionary lineage is clearly mammalian, so it's not as though there are any actual arguments on how to classify them.
For rodets, naked mole rats are built to last, reaching an age of up to 28 years, many times older than the oldest rats known. They also don't seem to process pain in the same way other mammals do, or at all really, and their nervous systems show no pain signalling when their skin is exposed to acid or capsaicin. It's thought that this is an adaptation to living in crowded burrows rich in carbon dioxide, which has a way of dropping the blood's pH. Most amazingly, cancer is unknown in naked mole rats, as their genomes appear to have a double-redundant mechanism to prevent cellular immortality. They might not be much to look at, but we clearly have a lot to learn from these little African beasts.
Of course, this discussion wouldn't be complete without the following video, my favorite by far in Zefrank1's True Facts series:
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