#lagamorphs

This one has decided to use the inside of my hydraulic table as a place to chill in the morning. It’s a quiet way of telling me I was right, she shouldn’t have bit and scratched at Bungie so much, and regrets it now.

Many people mistakenly call rabbits rodents because they look very similar–small, furry, fecund, frequent agricultural pests, buck teeth, etc. 

However, rabbits are not rodents (order, Rodentia), but lagamorphs (order, Lagamorpha)! What’s the difference? Lagamorphs are distinguished by a structural difference from rodents in the skull. Rodents have 2 top incisors, lagamorphs have 4.

But people aren’t too far off! Lagamorphs and rodents are pretty closely related, and share a common ancestor (now extinct). There used to be a ton of lagamoprhs back in the day, with over 230 species represented in the fossil record. But a few million years ago, lagamorphs declined and their cousins the rodents became way more successful at adapting to different ecological niches. Today the only lagamorphs alive are those in the family Leporidae (rabbits and hares) and Ochotonidae. And the only ochotonas left on Earth are pikas, which are these cute lil rodent-looking bbs, of which there are only ~30 species :/

So it’s a good thing rabbits breed so well, or else we’d hardly have any lagamorphs left!