Rabbits are lagomorphs, not rodents—and Rome farmed them early
Rabbits are small leporid mammals in Lagomorpha alongside hares and pikas—familiar as herbivores, prey, livestock, and pets. They are a paraphyletic grouping because hares nest inside Leporidae. Once lumped with rodents, lagomorphs branched earlier and keep two extra peg teeth rodents lack.
Rabbits, or bunnies, belong to the family Leporidae, together with hares, in the order Lagomorpha, which also contains pikas. Because hares of the genus Lepus sit inside the same family yet are not called rabbits, rabbits do not form one natural group. Lagomorphs were once filed with rodents, but they split off earlier and carry features rodents lack, including an extra pair of incisors. Resemblances were long blamed on convergent evolution; molecular studies instead found a shared ancestor, uniting the two in the clade Glires.
The two most widespread genera are Oryctolagus and Sylvilagus. The European rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus, gave rise to hundreds of domestic breeds and has been introduced to every continent but Antarctica. Sylvilagus holds over 13 wild species, including cottontails and tapetis, while rarer rabbits such as the pygmy, volcano and Sumatran striped rabbits have small ranges.
Everything about the body favours escape. Wide vision and large ears watch for danger, and the ears, packed with blood vessels, also shed heat. Long hind legs power fast hops and hard kicks. Rabbits live alone or in groups in nests or burrows, are mostly nocturnal and often sleep with their eyes open. They breed fast, with short pregnancies, litters of four to twelve kits and no fixed season, though many embryos die and diseases such as myxomatosis and rabbit hemorrhagic disease are widespread. In places including Australia they are serious pests.
Romans kept rabbits for meat, fur and wool by the first century BC, and breeding them as livestock is called cuniculture. The English word descends from Middle English rabet, a young coney, borrowed from Walloon; coney meant an adult until the 18th century and comes from Latin cuniculus, possibly from a Celtic word for dog. Bunny appears by the 1680s. Males are bucks, females does, and a group is a colony, nest or warren.
Source: Rabbit
