A new study has confirmed a question Chicagoans have been debating for years—did a rat actually make the infamous Chicago “Rat Hole”?
Before we can get to the bottom of the mystery, let’s take a trip back in time and revisit the history one of Chicago’s oddest attractions.
The beginning of the Rat Hole saga
It all started back in January of 2024, when a viral tweet introduced the so-called Chicago Rat Hole to the world.
Locals, however, had been aware of the oddity for years—a hilariously rat-shaped imprint left on a section of sidewalk in the city’s Roscoe Village neighborhood.
The fossil is speculated to have first appeared sometime in the early 2000s.
The Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation has since removed concrete slab containing the mold and preserved it within its facilities.
The true origins of the Rat Hole revealed
Since then, Chicagoans have hotly debated whether a common rat or another type of native rodent left the imprint.
Well now, the Royal Society has published a study settling the debate once and for all: a squirrel was the true culprit.
Scientists reached this conclusion by analyzing the imprint and comparing the proportions to that of eight native rodent species, and found that the imprint was 98.67% likely to have come from a squirrel.
Specifically, the imprint most closely aligned with the eastern grey squirrel at 50.67% likeliness, and the fox squirrel at 48.00% likeliness.
So there you have it Chicago, the Rat Hole is actually the “Squirrel Hole.” Go figure!