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Just in time for Easter , the oldestrabbitrelation is bounding onto the scientific scene .
flyspeck substructure bones from a 53 million - year - old rabbit ancestor represent the oldest known record of hippity - hoppity mammals and their penny-pinching evolutionary relative , according to a new study .
Tularemia, or rabbit fever, can be spread from rabbits, raccoons, skunks or other small mammals.
The articulatio talocruralis and cad pearl were discovered in a ember mine in Gujarat , in west - central India , and latterly come up by a squad of paleontologists to belong to to theLagomorpha , a classification of mammals that includesmodern - mean solar day hare , rabbit and pikas ( pikas are hamster - sized cony cousin-german ) .
" This is 35 million days older than anything that ’s ever been called a lagomorph on India , totally unexpected , " say lead story researcher Kenneth Rose , a professor in the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore . " Undoubtedly it ’s a new species ; doubtless it ’s a new genus ; it could even be a new family . "
The pipsqueak would have been much little than the classical Easter bunny rabbit , about the size of a hamster , weighing well under a half pound ( less than 100 gram ) . The bones were found implant in stuff deposited in demesne once covered with swamps and bays near a shore , suggesting the animal may have lived in some sort of close - shore environment .
The new lagomorph , detail online recently in the journalProceedings of the Royal Society B , would also be the early known mammalian identified in India from the Cenozoic earned run average , aka the Age of Mammals , which occurred after the defunctness consequence that wiped out non - avian dinosaurs , Rose said .
Rose ’s analysis of the Amerindic foot bone involved comparing them with eight living species of rabbits and rabbit , as well as two species of coney , which exist today in the Rocky Mountains and othermountainous part .
Rabbits and hares belong to one of two lagomorph families , calledLeporidae , while pikas are member of the other family calledOchotonidae . retiring grounds suggested the two lagomorph families had diverge some 35 million old age ago .
Rose ’s squad found the clappers , which are four to five times small than those of modern - day jackrabbit , resemble pikas in some of their primitive features . But unlike pikas , which do n’t hop , the bones demonstrate some advanced feature that would ’ve made this lapin - like animal quite ahopper . In fact , the clappers showed similar , yet more advance , features to previously unreported Chinese rabbit fossils that date stamp to the Middle Eocene date of reference , about 48 million age ago .
" These human foot bone look more like cottontail rabbit [ cony ] foot os , " Rose toldLiveScience . " They ’re from some more specialized , small run , jumping lagomorph . "
Rose add together , " Most likely , the lagomorphs develop somewhere in Central Asia and dispersed , and a small rabbit - like form get down to India quite too soon , around the time of the collision of India with Asia . "
