It was recorded as a Santamartamys specimen in 1913 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It is assumed that the specimen was obtained through a gift or was purchased.
A second specimen, also of undetermined gender, was discovered in around 1913 in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta by Carriker, but there is not much information regarding its location either, or the date of discovery. The specimen was of undetermined gender, and as all specimens of Smith's collections were collected by local hunters, there is no specific information regarding the location where the specimen was discovered. On 24 December 1898, Herbert Huntingdon Smith identified the first specimen of Santamartamys in Ocana, Santa Marta, Magdalena, Colombia. The species was initially identified as Isothrix rufodorsalis in 1899, re-classified as Diplomys rufodorsalis in 1935, and the monotypic genus Santamartamys was created in 2005 for the species. Found at altitudes of 700 to 2,000 metres, the species is endemic to Colombia in an isolated area with high levels of biodiversity. It is known only from three specimens, a specimen collected in 1898 in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and identified by Herbert Huntingdon Smith, a specimen identified by the American ornithologist and entomologist Melbourne Armstrong Carriker in 1913 at the same location, and a further specimen observed in the same location in 2011. IUCN list the species as critically endangered: it is affected by feral cats, climate change, and the clearing of forest in its potential range in coastal Colombia. It is nocturnal and is believed to feed on plant matter, and is mainly rufous, with young specimens having a grey coat. The red-crested tree-rat or Santa Marta toro (Santamartamys rufodorsalis) is a species of tree-rat found in the monotypic genus Santamartamys in the family Echimyidae.
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