Good luck indeed: 53 million-year-old rabbit's foot bones found

But one day, while using the jackrabbit foot bones as a teaching tool for a class, the shape of the bones in the class struck him as something he’d seen before among his collection of unidentified bones.

Sure enough, the tiny bones about a quarter of an inch long from India looked remarkably similar to ankle and foot bones from modern day jackrabbits, which are 4 to 5 times bigger.

Rose and his team set out and measured every dimension of their Indian bones and compared them to eight living species of rabbits and hares. They also compared them to two species of the related pika-that mouse-like, mountain-dwelling critter that lives in the Rocky Mountains of North America, among other places.

Using a technique called character analysis, the team first recorded measurements of 20 anatomical features of the bones, which showed that the bones are definitely Lagomorph and closer to rabbits than pikas. The scientists then ran a series of statistical tests on the individual measurements to see how they compared with the Chinese fossils as well as living rabbits and pikas. They found that although the Indian fossils resemble pikas in some primitive features, they look more like rabbits in specialized bone features.

Asked how many years of good luck one gets with a 53 million-year-old rabbit foot bone, Rose quipped that he “already got lucky with the feet, but what we really would like are some teeth that tell how different these animals really were.”

The research was funded by the National Geographic Society, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research of India, the Research Foundation Flanders and the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office.

Authors on the paper are Valerie Burke DeLeon and Rose of Hopkins; Pieter Missiaen of University of Ghent, Belgium; R.S. Rana and Lachham Singh of H.N.B. Garhwal University in Uttaranchal, India; Ashok Sahni of Panjab University, India; and Thierry Smith of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, Belgium.

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