Information about the rabbits

Rabbits are a part of our world, just a few of the dozens of hundreds of thousands(?) of vertebrates that inhabit this planet. If rabbits intrigue you, read on! The text of many of these facts come from Wikipedia articles, and many of those articles contain information that I added through my extensive rabbit research. You can read them by following the link in the notice in the footer of this page. I don't add a fact to this page unless I've verified it through researching the cited sources!

  1. The ears of a rabbit are used to regulate their body temperature. Blood vessels are distributed along the ears, and they can expand or contract to give off or conserve heat, respectively.
  2. Lop-eared rabbit breeds have a disadvantage compared to other rabbits as their ears cannot be used as effectively to hear or regulate temperature.
  3. The term "rabbit" derives from the Middle English rabet ("young of the coney"), a borrowing from the Walloon robète, which was a diminutive of the French or Middle Dutch robbe. The origin of this last term is unknown.
  4. Coney, another word for the rabbit, is derived from cuniculus, a Latin term referring to rabbits which has been in use from at least the first century BCE in Hispania. The word cuniculus may originate from a diminutive form of the word for "dog" in the Celtic languages.
  5. The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is the only species of rabbit that has been domesticated. Every breed of rabbit, from the Angora to the New Zealand, is derived from the European rabbit!
  6. The group of animals known as "rabbits" includes about thirty-two species that are classified within the taxonomic family Leporidae. It excludes the hares, which are all part of the genus Lepus and are also part of the leporid family.
  7. Hares have never been domesticated, but a breed of rabbit known as the "Belgian hare" was bred to look more hare-like.
  8. Rabbits and hares are part of the taxonomic order Lagomorpha. The only other lagomorphs are pikas, which are found in Europe, Asia, and North America. In Chinese, pikas are known as shǔtù (鼠兔), or "mouse-rabbits", which describes their appearance as the midpoint between mice and rabbits.
  9. Rabbits and rodents share a common ancestor. Early naturalists considered rabbits to be a type of rodent, and the term "lagomorph" didn't exist to describe a group separate from rodents until 1912.
  10. All rabbits have 28 teeth, except for the endangered Amami rabbit, which has two fewer molars. This gives it the generic (genus) name Pentalagus, meaning "five+hare".The Amami rabbit. Photo by Wich’yanan (Jay) Limparungpatthanakij, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
  11. The mythical jackalope is thought to have originated with sightings of rabbits infected with Shope papilloma virus, which causes cancerous growths to appear and extend from the rabbit in a manner that may appear like horns. Taxidermied rabbits that had been altered to have horns attached were popular in the 1930s, but legends of horned rabbits are known from the 13th century.