Small brain, small eyes, small ears, and a husky body – this was not a rabbit that was well-suited to quickly detecting and escaping danger. For a giant rabbit, Nuralagus had a relatively small head with small eyes, and the ear holes on the outside of the skull are no larger than they are in European rabbits. Lacking the leaping abilities of other species, Quintana and colleagues suggest that Nuralagus used its spread, curved fingers and robust arms to dig for roots and other underground foods.Ĭlues as to how such a large rabbit could have evolved at all can be seen in the skull. Likewise, the place where one of the lower arm bones – the ulna – articulated with the wrist was positioned in such a way that the rabbit’s whole forefoot would have contacted the ground, rather than just the tips of the toes as in other rabbits. This arrangement spread out the rabbit’s bulk over a wider area and reduced the amount of shock to its joints. Between three and five million years ago, Minorca hosted a varied group of organisms mostly made up of birds and small reptiles, with only two very large animals – the giant tortoise Cheirogaster gymnesica, and the huge, newly-described rabbit Nuralagus rex.Ĭompared to a European rabbit, Nuralagus had splayed fore- and hindfeet. Minorca was a kind of a natural, evolutionary experiment station – just as Madagascar was for lemurs, Hațeg Island was for dwarf dinosaurs, and Flores was for tiny humans and ground-dwelling storks – and so the assemblage of animals that once lived upon it was a mish-mash menagerie whose ancestors had fortuitously arrived there. Sitting smack in the middle of the Mediterranean just south of Spain, the island of Minorca was once home to a unique assemblage of animals that evolved in splendid isolation. A real-life giant rabbit recently discovered in the fossil deposits of Minorca, Spain might provide us with a better model of what an enormous “ Lepus” would look like. Sure, the best way to make a movie about enormous, bloodthirsty bunnies is to put a few normal-sized ones on miniature sets, but this little trick steps around the fact that there are constraints that cause organisms to change in shape as they change in size. The giant rabbits look too much like little rabbits. The stilted acting, the harebrained plot, the hordes of rabbits smeared with goo – Night of the Lepus was simply awful, but there is one subtle aspect of the film that, as a natural history nerd, really bugs me.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |