Harvey was an imaginary, 2 m tall rabbit which befriended Elwood P. Dowd in Mary Chase’s 1944 comedy of errors named after the said rabbit, filmed in 1950 and starring James Stewart as the affable though deranged Dowd. Though not so tall, a giant fossil rabbit (relative to modern rabbits) weighing it at 12 kg has emerged from the prolific Late Neogene cave deposits of Minorca (Quintana, J. Et al. 2011. Nuralagus rex, gen. et sp. nov., an endemic insular giant rabbit from the Neogene of Minorca (Balearic Islands, Spain). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, v. 31, p. 231-240). At about 3 times heavier than Barrington my lagomorphophagic (rabbit-eating to the uninitiated) cat, this would have been, to him, a beast best avoided, as the name N. rex might suggest. So unexpected was a gigantic rabbit that, interestingly, it was first mistaken for a fossil tortoise, albeit one lacking a carapace.

Island faunas have long been recognized as havens for peculiar trends in evolutionary successions, either towards dwarfism as in the case of the tiny elephants on which H. floresiensis preyed until quite recently on the Indonesian island of Flores or gigantism as in this remarkable case. As the authors infer, on account of the creature’s ‘…(short manus and pes with splayed phalanges, short and stiff vertebral column with reduced extension/flexion capabilities), and the relatively small size of sense-related areas of the skull (tympanic bullae, orbits, braincase, and choanae)…’ this was a rabbit which sadly could not hop. This un-rabbit-like locomotion may well have been a result of it not having needed to hop, being so large as to challenge seriously the largest Neogene predators on the island – lizards – and thereby saving energy. For much the same evolutionary logic, neither did N. rex have long ears, having less need to detect a stealthy nemesis.

The demise of Late Neogene megafaunas in general has often been ascribed to human intervention. Though N. rex became extinct at around 3 Ma and avoided human predation, later giants did not fare so well. A case in point is the celebrated wooly mammoth, the last of the steppe mammoths, that first appeared in the fossil record of Siberia around 750 ka ago (Nicholls H. 2011. Last days of the mammoth. New Scientist, v. 209 (26 March 2011), p. 54-57). DNA evidence from hairs preserved in permafrost suggests that ancestors of the steppe mammoth line diverged with that of Asian elephants from African elephant ancestors around 5 Ma. Interestingly, ancestral steppe mammoths – without shaggy coats but having the archetypical curved tusks – roamed Africa until 3 Ma when they disappear to reappear in Europe and Asia, yet without adaptation to cold until the onset of northern glaciations around 2.5 Ma. At that point the true steppe mammoths evolved increased tooth enamel needed for a diet of mainly silica-rich grasses to resist wear. The family spread to North America when sea-level fell to expose the sea floor of the Bering Straits. The woolly mammoth is the star partly because specimens periodically turn up almost perfectly preserved in permafrost. This has allowed almost half of a full DNA sequence to be restored. Preserved haemoglobin from a woolly mammoth shares with that from modern musk oxen an ability to release oxygen at temperatures well below zero so that they could function even if their extremities became chilled.

Astonishingly, all elephants urinate so copiously that they soak their range lands in DNA, though it only lingers in ultra cold climes. This bizarre fact encouraged a large team of palaeobiologists to comb frozen soils in an alluvium section in Arctic Alaska for mammoth DNA (Haile, J and 17 others, 2009. Ancient DNA reveals late survival of mammoth and horse in interior Alaska.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, v. 106, p. 22352–22357). Mammoth DNA turned up in soils as young as 10.5 ka. Moreover mammoth overlapped with human occupation for several millennia, casting doubt on theories that mammoth extinction resulted either from human predation or the introduction of epidemic disease that might have felled mammoths quickly: they declined gradually. Yet the empirical fact that steppe mammoths in general and the woolly mammoth in particular survived through at least 8 major glacial-interglacial transitions only to become extinct at the start of the current Holocene interglacial period at the same time as humans recolonised the frigid desert of Arctic latitudes, where woolly mammoths could survive except at the last glacial maximum surely points to some influence that arose from human activity.

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