The Way of the Hare by Marianne Taylor

Author:Marianne Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472909909
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Lagomorphs started strongly, in evolutionary terms. As we saw in chapter 2, the ancestor of all lagomorphs diverged from the rodents sometime around 55–45 million years ago, and did very well for itself for a time, colonising the whole world and diversifying into hundreds of species. Its ability to live on grass, which few other animals can do, was key to this success. However, competition with an apparently better-adapted bunch of grass-eaters, the ungulates or hoofed mammals, slammed the brakes on lagomorph evolution. Only the most resilient and versatile lineages survived, along with a few island or otherwise isolated forms that were simply lucky enough to live somewhere that didn’t have any ungulates, but their luck didn’t necessarily hold out for too long.

Take, for example, the mighty Nuralagus rex, aka the ‘Minorcan giant lagomorph’, biggest of all bunnies. It’s hard to believe that this 23kg beast, native to the Balearic island of Minorca, was even a lagomorph at all. Reconstructions, based on the size and solidity of its bones, show an animal that looks more like a wombat than a rabbit – stocky, robust, hump-backed and not noticeably long-legged – it would not have been able to leap like a rabbit or hare and would have bumbled around more in the manner of a badger. Even if the reconstruction gives it a pair of big rabbit ears it still looks very little like any lagomorph, but the details of its bones insist that it was one.

The first N. rex bone was found by a 19-year-old student, Josep Quintana, who’s now working as a paleontologist at the Institut Català de Palentologia in Barcelona, though at the time the significance of the find escaped him, as he explains: ‘I was not aware what this bone represented. I thought it was a bone of the giant Minorcan turtle!’ It took several more years for him and his team to extract enough of a sample from the rocks to build up a real picture of what N. rex would have looked like, and how very big it was. It was the animal’s skull and teeth that confirmed its lagomorph-ness. It had, essentially, a very big but fairly standard rabbit skull, with the unique lagomorph dentition, mounted on a big cumbersome body that Quintana likened to ‘a beaver out of water’.

The ancestors of N. rex, which were almost certainly more conventional-sized lagomorphs, reached Minorca when it was connected to Spain by a land bridge, about 5.3 million years ago. They were then stuck there when the Zanclean flood took away the bridge. With no natural predators, the animals followed the ‘island rule’ – that small animals isolated on an island and in no danger of being eaten by other animals tend to get bigger – as well as becoming slower, fatter and generally less well equipped to escape danger. In other words, better adapted to a life in which there was no danger. One thing that evolution does not do well is what you might call ‘future-proofing’.

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