Rabbit’s Foot

Merrily he hops through the countryside with his basket of brightly colored eggs leaving them to delight children everywhere. He is, of course, the Easter Bunny, one of the more peculiar legends of our civilization.

How on earth did it get started? From earliest times we hear of this mysterious creature. The stories were obviously pre-Christian and told of a rabbit or hare that would come in the spring and lay colored eggs amongst the greenery. The hare was purported to be the companion of the Saxon goddess Ostara (or Eostra) , but similar tales originate all over Europe and the Middle East. These eggs were thought to be signs of auspicious tidings from the gods and were highly prized when found.

An egg laying rabbit? In spite of the obvious fertility symbolism it hardly seems the likely stuff of myth. While it is true that many a mythical beast combines attributes from a number of animals, they are almost always limited to the physical characteristics rather than behaviors. A horse with the wings of an eagle rather than a chicken that marks fence posts like a dog. This oviparous lagomorph seems to be an uncommon exception to the rule.

It was not until 1926, when a unique fossil was found in a Spanish gravel pit that anything like an answer to this question emerged. Orlando Rojas, an itinerant bricklayer, found a peculiar stone while stealing a few pounds of gravel for bordering his garden from a quarry outside Toledo.

A friend who could read told him that the stone might be able to be sold to someone at the University. It was, to a German paleontologist named Helmut Steinhass who, by luck, had been working in Spain that year.

When the discovery was made initially, no one in the paleontological community thought much of it. It appeared to be the hind leg bones from a small leaping mammal. The fossil was embedded in mudstone from the Miocene epoch. Steinhass named it lagotherium steinhassi (Steinhass's rabbit beast) because he believed that it led a lifestyle similar to that of a rabbit.

The bones themselves clearly revealed that the animal was neither an actual rabbit nor anything closely related to a rabbit. Fossils unearthed by Steinhass himself the following season revealed even more striking differences when he found first teeth and then an almost complete skeleton including jawbones designed to support a peculiar horny beak that served the same purpose as a rabbit’s cutting incisors. The animal had molars that seemed to indicate a diet of roots and grasses. He thought at first that he had some sort of unusual European possum but careful examination and consultation with his colleagues led him inevitably to the correct conclusion. The creature was a monotreme, in the same subclass as the strange duckbilled platypus and its relative, the spiny anteater of Australia. This group of animals exists in a biological never-never land between mammals and reptiles. While they have warm blood, nurse their young and grow a rich hairy coat, they lack nipples, have a conjoined genital, urinary and anal tract and rather than bear their young alive, they lay eggs. They are, unfortunately, poorly represented in the fossil record. It is believed by some scientists that the monotremes descended independently from the cynodonts, a group of advanced reptiles that gave rise to the mammals, but this has yet to be proven.

While the modern placental mammals and their marsupial cousins are all related by evolutionary paths, which have been well understood, the descent of the monotremes is more obscure. Lagotherium was the first such animal discovered to have lived in Europe in anything approaching recent times.

In 1926, Steinhass was already sixty-two years old and suffered from infirmities, which kept him from work in the blazing sun day after day. He was unable to follow up on the strong start he had made with lagotherium save for a short paper on the subject that included sketches of the existing fossils. He died in 1931 and the paper was tucked away in a university library at Heidelberg where it would sit unread for over forty years.

Peter Reston, an American graduate student working in Heidelberg in the spring of 1974, had taken an interest in the life of Steinhass as part of his work on the history of German natural philosophy. In the course of his studies he read every paper Steinhass had ever written including the one about the fossil known as lagotherium. Although the paper didn't figure prominently in his thesis, he remembered it as a fascinating curiosity.

By 1982, Reston had become a lecturer in the history of science at Harvard. In his spare time he had been compiling a book for the lay readership on the collections, or "cabinets" as they were known, kept by scientists before the nineteenth century. These collections are what evolved into modern natural history museums as their owners died and left them to their respective universities.

To the dismay of scholars, many of these cabinets were broken up and, inevitably, some specimens were lost. On the other hand, some institutions were relentlessly conservative and made a point of preserving the old cabinets exactly as they had been put together centuries ago. In researching his book he spent many an hour going over dusty volumes containing etchings, which had been made of some long lost collections.

The illustrations were as often as not made by an artist who had little knowledge of what he was looking at with the result being rather inexact representations of the cabinet's contents.

One March day, something in one of the etchings caught his eye. It was one of several desiccated specimens of God-only-knows-what represented at a rather small size. There was a number next to it, which was repeated amongst the somewhat fancy type below the picture identifying it as lepus insolitum (strange rabbit). For Reston, there was something about this “rabbit” that set off an alarm in his brain. It wasn't until the next day while he was taking his morning shower that the name lagotherium popped into his mind. That afternoon he was back at his desk looking for the exact illustration that he had seen before. Anton VanDenPael, a noted physician of The Hague, had assembled the particular cabinet he sought in the 1770's.

The collection, Reston discovered after much research, had been broken up in the late nineteenth century when a descendant had fallen upon hard times and sold it off piecemeal. The tiny mummy might have never again surfaced had it not been spotted on television by a friend of Reston's son. The specimen in question was now part of the collection of Edmund Swift an eccentric English popular science writer who also had a television show for children. His show, titled "Small Wonder" ran on a number of PBS stations in the USA and was popular with pre-adolescents. He was frankly surprised to see the specimen used in this way, for its appearance was, to say the least, unsettling, probably more so to children.

Swift, it seems, had no idea what he had. He had been using it to demonstrate how mummification can take place in nature and was under the impression that the creature was a perfectly ordinary rabbit who’s features had been distorted by desiccation.

Reston telephoned Swift and arranged to meet with him in London where he might have it x-rayed and make detailed measurements of the shriveled remains.

The specimen was in worse condition than in 1778. The small, desiccated animal was incomplete, lacking a foreleg and one of the longish ears; further, most of the reddish fur was long gone. In spite of the things lacking, it corresponded bone for bone with the known fossils of lagotherium. The creature was interesting both for how rabbit-like and un-rabbit-like it was. It had the hind legs of a cottontail replicated in a virtually perfect example of parallel evolution and the remaining ear was almost the same shape as that of a European hare. The face was quite different from just about anything he had seen before. Although the flesh was dry and shriveled, the features could be discerned quite reliably. The jaw structure was quite similar in shape to that of a lagomorph, but all of the components seemed to have been derived from completely different structures most notably, where the front incisors would have been was a beak that had been grown to a shape designed to serve a similar purpose. There were lips around the beak, but they probably could not have been closed all the way in the living creature. The nostrils opened on the outer edge of the upper beak and were not all that easy to notice giving the animal an appearance of being noseless. The eyes were placed rather far forward and somewhat closer together than those of a rabbit probably giving the creature reasonably good binocular vision. The result was not a cute bunny face, particularly in the case of a dried mummy, but even in life, lagotherium would have looked quite strange to an observer used to the body plan of placental mammals.

Neither Swift nor Reston were able to discern reliably where or when the animal was found. Reston knew from the etching that it had been collected at least two-hundred years before. A large percentage of the flesh had become adipocere, a natural soapy substance that animal fat can convert to under certain conditions, one of which is being frozen for some time following death. The important result of this was that the original shape of the animal was better preserved than it might have been. Carbon dating showed the creature to be approximately nine thousand years dead, which almost placed it within the realm of human history. MRI scans showed the internal structure well enough to clearly indicate that it was indeed a monotreme, a female carrying an egg. Careful dissection revealed it to be mottled in shades of green, blue and brown, ideal camouflage amongst foliage.

Reston was now certain he had found the creature that was responsible for tales of the hare who comes in the spring to lay colored eggs in the grass. Swift sold the specimen to Reston for two thousand dollars who took it to The Hague in hopes of turning up information on VanDenPael and possibly the origin of the creature. There he was able to find copies of VanDenPael's notebooks in a college library. The good doctor had bought the carcass from a merchant who had obtained it near the banks of the Tigris River. Armed with this information, Reston named his specimen lagotherium steinhassi Mesopotamia (Steinhass's rabbit beast from the land between the rivers).

Returning to the U.S., Reston gave a series of lectures at Harvard with the purpose in mind of mounting an expedition to Iraq. According to VanDenPael’s notes the mummy had been found near the modern town of Zaya to the north of Baghdad. A farmer had turned it up in a field that he had been plowing. Presumably it had washed down the river and deposited in the soil during a spring flood. This is where his search was to begin. Money for the expedition was finally obtained through the university and various alumni and a starting date was set for January 1991. January 1991 was an unlucky date for it found the United States at war with Iraq which made any kind of expedition there impractical, to say the least. Peter Reston, with great regret, was forced to abandon his quest for the elusive creature.

He returned to his books and his lectures, more or less forgetting about lagotherium.

On April 14th, 1995, which was Good Friday, he received a package from Turan in the obscure region of Tuva in the Russian Federation. The return address was from a scientist that he had barely heard of, but who had apparently heard of him, a Doctor Yelena Ya. Turetskeva. It was a wooden crate about four inches on a side and within, cradled in a nest of excelsior was an egg about two centimeters around, only slightly ovoid, mottled blue, green and brown. It stirred slightly. Something tiny and alive dwelt within.

The letter that came with it was written in Russian and he would have to get it translated, but within the Cyrillic text were two English words. They read “Happy Easter”.