(c) Seth Kallen Deitch
Merrily he hops through the countryside with his basket of brightly colored eggs leaving them to delight children everywhere. He is, of course, the Easter Bunny, one of the more peculiar legends of our civilization.
How on earth did it get started? From earliest medieval times we hear of this mysterious creature. The stories were obviously pre-Christian and told of a rabbit or hare which would come in the spring and lay colored eggs amongst the greenery. These eggs were thought to be signs of auspicious tidings from the gods and were highly prized when found.
An egg laying rabbit? In spite of the obvious fertility symbolism it hardly seems the likely stuff of myth. While it is true that many a mythical beast combines attributes from a number of animals, they are almost always limited to the physical characteristics rather than behaviors. A horse with the wings of an eagle rather than a chicken which marks fence posts like a dog. This oviparous lagomorph seems to be the singular exception to the rule. It was not until 1926, when a unique fossil was found in a Spanish gravel pit, that anything like an answer to this question emerged. Orlando Rojas, an itinerant bricklayer, found a peculiar stone while stealing a few pounds of gravel from a quarry outside Toledo.
A friend who could read told him that the stone might be able to be sold to someone at the University. It was, to a German paleontologist named Helmut Steinhass who, by luck, had been working in Spain that year.
When the discovery was made initially, no one in the paleontological community thought much of it. It was the bones of a the hind leg of a small leaping mammal. The fossil was embedded in mudstone from the Miocene epoch. Steinhass named it lagotherium steinhassi (Steinhass's rabbit beast) because he believed that it led a life similar to that of a rabbit.
The bones themselves clearly revealed that the animal was neither a rabbit nor anything closely related to a rabbit. Fossils unearthed the following season made this even clearer when he found first teeth and then an almost complete skeleton. He thought at first that he had some sort of peculiar European possum but careful examination and consultation with his colleagues led him inevitably to the correct conclusion. The creature was a monotreme, a relative of the rare and strange duckbilled platypus and the spiny anteater of Australia. This group of animals exist in a biological never-never land between mammals and reptiles. While they have warm blood, nurse their young and grow a rich hairy coat, they lack nipples, have a conjoined genital, urinary and anal tract and rather than bear their young alive, they lay eggs. They are, unfortunately, poorly represented in the fossil record. It is believed by some scientists that the monotremes descended independently from the cynodonts, a group of advanced reptiles which gave rise to the mammals, but this has yet to be proven.
While the modern placental mammals and their marsupial cousins are all related by evolutionary paths which have been well understood, the descent of the monotremes is more obscure.
Lagotherium was the first such animal discovered to have lived in Europe in anything approaching recent times. In 1926, Steinhass was already sixty-two years old and suffered from infirmities which kept him from work in the blazing sun day after day. He was unable to follow up on the strong start he had made with lagotherium save for a short paper on the subject which included sketches of the existing fossils. He died in 1931 and the paper was tucked away in a university library at Heidelberg. Peter Reston, an American graduate student working in Heidelberg in the spring of 1974, had taken an interest in the life of Steinhass as part of his work on the history of German natural philosophy. In the course of his studies he read every paper Steinhass had ever written including the one about the fossil known as lagotherium. Although the paper didn't figure prominently in his thesis, he remembered it as a fascinating curiosity.
By 1982, Reston had become a lecturer in the history of science at Harvard.
In his spare time he had been compiling a book for the lay readership on the collections, or "cabinets" as they were known, kept by scientists before the nineteenth century. These collections are what evolved into modern natural history museums as their owners died and left them to their respective universities.
To the dismay of scholars, many of these cabinets were broken up and, inevitably, some specimens were lost. On the other hand, some institutions were relentlessly conservative and made a point of preserving the old cabinets exactly as they had been put together centuries ago. In researching his book he spent many an hour going over dusty volumes containing etchings which had been made of some long lost collections.
The illustrations were as often as not made by an artist who had little knowledge of what he was looking at with the result being rather inexact representations of the cabinet's contents.
One March day, something in one of the etchings caught his eye. It was one of several desiccated specimens of God-only-knows-what represented at a rather small size. There was a number next to which was repeated amongst the somewhat fancy type below the picture identifying it as lepus insolitum (strange rabbit). For Reston, there was something about this rabbit that set off an alarm in his brain. It wasn't until the next day while he was taking his morning shower that the name lagotherium popped into his mind. That afternoon he was back at his desk looking for the exact illustration that he had seen before. The particular cabinet he sought was assembled by Anton VanDenPael, a noted physician of The Hague in the 1770's.
The collection, he found after much research, had been broken up in the late nineteenth century when a descendant had fallen upon hard times and sold it off piecemeal. The tiny mummy might have never again surfaced had it not been spotted on television by a friend of Reston's son. The specimen in question was now part of the collection of Edmund Swift an eccentric English popular science writer who also had a television show for children. His show, titled "Small Wonder" ran on a number of PBS stations and was popular with pre-adolescents. He was frankly surprised to see the specimen used in this way, for its appearance was, to say the least, unsettling. Probably more so to children. Reston telephoned Swift and arranged to meet with him in London where he might have it x-rayed and take detailed measurements of the shriveled remains. Swift, it seems, had no idea what he had.
It wasn't the same piece as it was in 1778. The small desiccated animal was incomplete, lacking a foreleg, one ear and the lower jaw. further, most of the reddish fur was long gone. In spite of the things lacking, it corresponded bone for bone with the known fossils of lagotherium. Neither Swift nor Reston were able to discern reliably where or when the animal was found. Reston knew from the etching that it was at least two-hundred years old. A large percentage of the flesh had converted to a soapy substance indicating that the body had been frozen at some point. Carbon dating showed the creature to be approximately nine thousand years dead, which almost placed it within the realm of human history. MRI scans showed the internal structure well enough to clearly indicate that it was indeed a monotreme. A female carrying an egg. A careful dissection revealed it to be mottled in shades of green, blue and brown, ideal camouflage amongst foliage.
Reston was now certain that he had found the creature which was responsible for tales of the hare who comes in the spring to lay brightly colored eggs in the grass. Swift sold the specimen to Reston for two-thousand dollars who took it to The Hague in hopes of turning up information on VanDenPael and possibly the origin of the creature. There he was able to find copies of VanDenPael's notebooks in a college library. The good doctor had bought the carcass from an adventurer who had obtained it near the banks of the Tigris river. Armed with this information, Reston named his specimen lagotherium steinhassi Mesopotamia (Steinhass's rabbit beast from the land between the rivers).
Returning to the U.S., Reston gave a series of lectures at Harvard with the purpose in mind of mounting an expedition to Iraq. The mummy had been found near the modern town of Zaya to the north of Baghdad. A farmer had turned it up in a field which he had been plowing. This is where his search was to begin. Money for the expedition was finally obtained through the university and various alumni and a starting date was set for January 1991. January 1991 was an unlucky date for it found the United States at war with Iraq which made any kind of expedition there impractical, to say the least. Peter Reston was forced to abandon his quest for the elusive creature.
He returned to his books and his lectures, more or less forgetting about lagotherium.
On April 14th, 1995, which was Good Friday, he received a package from Turan in the obscure region of Tuva in the Russian Federation. The return address was from a scientist that he had barely heard of, a Doctor Yelena Ya. Poriskova. It was a wooden crate about four inches on a side and within, cradled in a nest of excelsior was an egg mottled blue, green and brown. It stirred slightly as if something tiny and alive dwelt within.
The card that came with it had only two words, "Happy Easter".