BROADCASTS.com

It's April Fool's Day, but while these two mystery animals may mostly be associated with hoaxes and tall tales, there's a really interesting nugget of truth in both.\n\nUnlocked Patreon episode about mammals with nose horns\n\nFurther reading: Dr Karl P N Shuker's blog post about winged cats and his blog post about horned hares\n\nTraditional drawings of horned hares:\n\n\n\nYou can take classes in taxidermy that specialize in making jackalopes!\n\n\n\nA genuine horned hare (with an extreme case of SPV):\n\n\n\nA winged cat:\n\n\n\nMitzi/Thomas the winged cat:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nThis episode releases on April Fool\u2019s Day, April 1. I\u2019m not a fan of April fool jokes, so we\u2019re going to discuss two interesting strange animals that turned out to be hoaxes\u2014but hoaxes with a nugget of truth that\u2019s actually more interesting than the hoax.\n\nThe first hoax is akin to the jackalope and it\u2019s pretty obvious to us nowadays. The horned hare was a tradition in European folklore and drawings of it look like a jackalope. There are even stuffed horned hares, just as there are stuffed jackalopes.\n\nSome of you may be wondering what the heck a jackalope is, so I\u2019ll explain that first.\n\nThe jackalope legend may have started as a tall tale, but was probably just a taxidermy joke. When someone prepares a dead animal for taxidermy, it\u2019s not a simple process. The taxidermist has to remove the skin from the body, clean it and add preservatives, make a careful armature or mannequin of the body out of wood or other materials, and put the skin on the armature and sew it up. The taxidermist then adds details like glass eyes and artificial tongues. It can take months of painstaking work to finish a specimen, and it requires a lot of artistry and training. Taxidermists who are learning the trade will often mount small, common animals like rabbits and rats as practice. And sometimes they\u2019ll get creative with the process, just to make it more interesting. For instance, a taxidermist may add pronghorn antelope horns to a jackrabbit. Voila, there\u2019s a jackalope!\n\nYou can see stuffed jackalopes today in a lot of places, since they\u2019re fun conversation pieces. Some restaurants will have one stuck up on a wall somewhere, for instance. Horned hares are similar, but instead of a jackrabbit with pronghorn horns or white-tailed deer antlers, which are animals from North America, the European horned hare is usually a European hare with horns [I should have said antlers] from a roe deer.\n\nThe horned hare was such a common taxidermied animal that people actually believed it was real. Eventually, around the 19th century, as knowledge of the natural world grew more sophisticated, scientists realized rabbits and hares don\u2019t have horns and those stuffed specimens were just hoaxes. The tip-off was probably when taxidermists started getting really fancy and adding bird wings and saber teeth to their mounted hares.\n\nBut\u2026\n\nThe horned hare goes way back in history. It appeared in medieval bestiaries, sometimes called the unicorn hare. The unicorn hare was supposed to have a single black horn on its head. The hare would act normal, but when someone approached, it would spring at them and stab them with its horn. Then it would eat them. The legend of the horned hare is so widespread and long-lived, in fact, and was believed for so long, that it\u2019s easy to think maybe it was based on something real. I mean, we just talked about rodents with nose horns a few weeks ago, so nothing\u2019s impossible.\n\nWait, I think that\u2019s a Patreon episode. If it is, I\u2019ll unlock it. I\u2019ll put a link in the show notes.\n\nThere is a strange truth behind all the jackalopes and horned hares. A disease called the Shope papilloma virus, or SPV, affects hares and rabbits. There are a lot of papilloma viruses in various animals, even humans, but in most animals, including humans, it only results in tumors in the body.