#oryctolagus

A European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) in Andalucía, Spain

Welcome to DinApril 2026, where instead of recycling my list from last year, I made my father come up with the dinosaurs! Our fifth day features his favorite ornithopod: Hadrosaurus foulkii! A New Jersey woman has discovered that someone has laid eggs in her Easter basket and wants to know who the culprit is; unbeknownst to her, her pet rabbit has an idea of who the culprit is: a female Hadrosaurus hiding in the woman's hedge, blending into the background with her green scales.

The implication that the woman's other Easter guests are other female dinosaurs is sending me.

I was down in the southwest the other day, well before dawn, and there were a good number of rabbits hopping about. That’s nothing unusual, since feral European Rabbits are probably the most abundant mammal in Australia (and as big an environmental disaster as you can imagine) but in this case a number of the rabbits were black.

SOMEONE HAS KILLED THE BLACK RABBIT OF INLÉ

But on a more serious note, rabbits really have caused huge damage to the Australian environment, ever since they were released by European settlers.  One individual held largely to blame is Thomas Austin, who released a few dozen hybrid wild and domestic rabbits for hunting purposes in 1859, on his property near Winchelsea, Victoria. Austin had been an avid hunter in England, and thought releasing twelve grey rabbits, five hares, seventy-two partridges and some sparrows would be just fucking dandy. There’d been rabbits kept domestically around the colonies before that, but these hybrids proved especially hardy and the population promptly exploded. Rabbits became so prevalent that by 1870 two million could be shot or trapped annually without having any noticeable effect on the population. It was the fastest spread ever recorded, of any mammal, anywhere in the world.

Efforts to try and stop the spread of the vermin include a 1,833 kilometer long fence to keep them out of Western Australia (it didn’t work),releasing myxamatosis (you might remember the White Blindness from Watership Down - the disease was initially very effective, but the survivors have an ever increasing resistance to the virus), and most recently rabbit calicivirus. Unfortunately, the latter hasn’t been as effective as hoped, not least because it escaped the quarantine test zone early, but also because there was already another calicivirus loose in the cooler states that gives rabbits partial immunity to the deadly form. 

As a very thin silver lining, rabbits were an important part of the Australian diet during the Depression (one Sydney football team is still called the Rabbitohs after the people that caught and sold them) and they do form a major part of the diet of some of our predators, such as the Wedge-tailed Eagle.

Myxomatosis Myxomatosis is a servere viral disease in rabbits that decimated wild UK populations when it was introduced 50 years ago. It is a highly infectious and usually fatal disease, which causes swelling of the mucous membranes and inflammation and discharge around the eyes.