bunnies

Okay, we admit it: ‘rodent’ is a bit mean. While the rabbit was once a card-carrying member of the order Rodentia, it achieved such world-spanning success and biological diversity that, in 1912, it was re-categorised into its own section: the mighty Lagomorpha. (But ‘the world’s most lovable Lagomorph’ just doesn’t have the same ring, you know?)

The fossil record suggests that the first Lagomorphs emerged in Asia some forty million years ago, while much of the world still shared a common land bridge. Then, as now, the Lagomorphs were good breeders and better invaders, so when the continents split into their present configuration, they ended up with a footprint on every single one bar Australia, filling the world with more than forty different species of hare, rabbit and short-eared pika (the little-known inspiration for Pokemon’s Pikachu).

But the rabbit we know best, the European rabbit, is a more recent invention. It emerged around 4,000 years ago on the Iberian Peninsula, and it was sufficiently plentiful in the time of the early Roman Empire that it became one of the primary