Whence
European rabbit
Animal

Where does European rabbit come from?

The European rabbit comes from the Iberian Peninsula and southwestern France. People carried it from there to Britain, Australia and hundreds of other places, and every breed of pet rabbit descends from this one wild species.

An Iberian native

The oldest fossils of today's species, Oryctolagus cuniculus, are about 600,000 years old and come from southern Spain, and the first fossils of its genus, found in Granada, are 6 million years old. Of several related species, only this rabbit survived into the Late Pleistocene, when it spread from Iberia around the Mediterranean and into northern Europe. Its native range today is Spain, Portugal and southwestern France, where the Iberian lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle depend on it for food.

Carried by people

The Romans linked rabbits with Iberia: coins of the emperor Hadrian show Hispania with a rabbit at her feet. Rabbits taken to the Balearic Islands bred so fast that, according to Strabo, their burrows overturned houses and trees, and Pliny the Elder wrote that the islanders begged the emperor Augustus for military help against them. From the Middle Ages, monasteries, Norman dukes and kings spread rabbits across Europe, and Spanish and Portuguese ships took them to the Canary Islands and the Azores.

Why people say Australia

Australia is famous for its rabbits, but they are newcomers. Five tame rabbits arrived with the First Fleet in 1788; the plague began later. On 6 October 1859 William Austin shipped wild rabbits caught on the family's land at Baltonsborough in Somerset, England, with some tame ones, aboard the Lightning. On Christmas Day 24 rabbits reached Melbourne, bound for his brother Thomas's estate, Barwon Park in Victoria, where they were released as game for shooting parties. Within 50 years their descendants had spread across the whole continent.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › European rabbit ↗ · sciencedaily.com ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Thomas Austin (pastoralist) ↗ · perseus.tufts.edu ↗

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