Well, actually just the rabbit’s foot, which turned up in an excavation at the Vastan lignite mines in Gujarat several years ago. Its an interesting discovery because it appears to push back the origins of lagomorphs by some 20 million years, from the late Eocene (as was previously thought) to the early Eocene. And the authors argue that the foot they found actually has characteristics similar not only to lagomorphs, but modern leporids, raising doubts about the earlier notion that rabbits diverged from pikas.

Interestingly from an Indian perspective, the fossils are also older by about 35 years than the previous oldest fossil rabbits known from India! Which might lead to some rethinking about the origins of lagomorphs, which is thought to have occurred in Central Asia.

The discovery is published in this paper in the May issue of the Proc. Royal Soc, Lond. B.: Rose et al. (2008) Early Eocene lagomorph (Mammalia) from Western India and the early diversification of Lagomorpha,. (If you don’t have access to the journal, but want to read the paper, let me know, so I can email you a pdf).

National Geographic had a story on this discovery several months ago, and there is also this blog post, where you can read more (easier to read these for non-paleontologists like me!).

What’s remarkable is also the serendipitous nature of the discovery – not the discovery of the fossils themselves, which were part of a routine dig, but the realization on Rose’s part that the unidentified little foot bones in the back of a drawer in his lab might come from a rabbit! Rose was showing jackrabbit bones to his class when his brain suddenly made the connection that they looked like the fossils he had found in India several years earlier. Why didn’t he recognize they were rabbit earlier? Because no one ever expected to find rabbits in deposits from the early Eocene in India, given that the oldest known fossils from the region were from a mere 18 mya.

Cool eh?! Reminds me of the re-discovery of the Rusty-spotted Cat in India (also in Gujarat, probably not too far from where the rabbits foot was found) in 1990 or so. After decades of presumed local extinction, the cat was rediscovered by a forest officer in Gir National Park. And shortly thereafter, I remember Dr. AJT Johnsingh (my mentor then at the Wildlife Institute of India) going through some old photos he had taken in Gir some years earlier and smacking himself on the forehead as he stared at a small cat he’d snapped one night! Indeed, it was the Rusty – captured just the same way the forest officer had done, with a camera! Except, (perhaps knowing a little too much about cats) AJTJ had simply assumed it was one of the common Jungle Cats without bothering to study the picture closely enough to id it!

A couple of questions for folks here:

1. What’s the status of paleontology in India, in general? This paper had three Indian co-authors, from Garhwal and Punjab Universities.

2. Also, given the recent draconian restrictions on export of tissue samples from wild animals from India – is it easier to get fossils out? Which ministry might worry about that, I wonder…

And an admin note: I’m hoping to jumpstart discussion in the EEBIndia group by launching this journal club, to feature any interesting papers any of us come across that may be relevant to the scope of this group. I hope you like the idea, and will start participating by commenting on this, or posting other papers that have caught your own eye!