24 APRIL 2021
If you've ever wondered why rabbits and hares never evolved to be the size of horses, scientists have now got the answer.
It might sound like a flippant question, but it gets to an important part of evolutionary science: What is it that causes some animal taxonomies to have such a wide variation in size, while with others it's very small?
For example, lagomorphs – which include rabbits and hares – don't vary much in size, whereas the closely related rodents can go all the way from the tiny pygmy mouse to the chunky capybaras with hundreds of times as much mass.