As Rob Dunn reported in the March 25, 2011 edition of Smithsonian Magazine, the idea of giving hamsters a name that is associated with "hoarding" a large amount of food in facial cheeks also turned out to make sense in the Arabic-speaking world. According to Dunn, a biologist named Israel Aharoni was searching, in 1930, for a "rare golden mammal" living in the "hills of Syria" whose Arabic name translated as "Mr. Saddlebags." The mammal turned out to be what we now call a hamster, the rodent whose cheeks resemble saddlebags when full.