BY MATT SIMON
05.14.14 |
6:30 AM |
The horned rabbit (Lepus cornutus) appears in 1650′s Historiae Naturalis de Quadrupetibus Libri, meaning The History Book of Natural Quadrangles. Look at me now, Latin teacher from college who gave me bad grades. Source:Biodiversity Heritage Library
Having grown up in the ’90s in the suburbs of San Francisco, my first encounter with the wily jackalope was not in the wild. It was on the show America’s Funniest People, in which a recurring skit starred a hilariously unrealistic rabbit puppet with the horns of an antelope and the habits of a sociopath.
FANTASTICALLY WRONG
It’s OK to be wrong, even fantastically so, because when it comes to understanding our world, mistakes mean progress. From folklore to pure science, these are humankind’s most bizarre theories.
That puppet made a big impression on me. For the uninitiated, the show’s jackalope stories revolved around the creature assaulting humans–whether they deserved it or not–typically jabbing them in the bum with its horns. This was not, however, the first time the jackalope has been sighted in the United States. The critter has long been a fixture in American folklore. But as it turns out, the jackalope isn’t purely a work of fiction.
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