Tradition: French Mythology
Alternative Names: Horned Hare, Horned Rabbit, Lepus Cornutus
Category: Rabbit
The Myth
The Lepus cornutus, meaning “horned hare,” was a supposedly real animal described in European writings from the medieval period through the eighteenth century. Although now generally regarded as fictional, it appeared in natural history works alongside genuine animals. Medieval and Renaissance authors sometimes treated horned hares as real creatures, while others used them in humorous or fantastical writing, including François Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Conrad Gessner’s Historiae animalium provided an early description of the horned hare as a real animal, claiming that it lived in Saxony.
The creature continued to appear in natural history publications over the following centuries. John Jonston included an illustration in his Historiae naturalis de quadrupetibus libri (1655), and the image was subsequently reused in other works. Gaspar Schott discussed and illustrated the horned hare in Physica curiosa (1662). Gabriel Clauder published an account of a supposed sighting in 1687, while Jacob Theodor Klein included another illustration in Summa dubiorum (1743). These repeated descriptions and images helped sustain the belief that the unusual animal might exist.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, naturalists had largely rejected the horned hare as a genuine species. Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre’s Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique (1789) was apparently among the last major scientific works to present it as real, although an 1817 natural history dictionary still considered the possibility that it might be an exceptionally rare animal. Its origins remain uncertain: the reports may have resulted from imaginative invention or fabricated specimens, while another theory suggests that some sightings involved hares affected by Shope papillomavirus, which can produce horn-like growths on the skin.
Sources
“Lepus cornutus.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepus_cornutus