Hare from Ice Age discovery

This is a video of a snow hare in its summer fur coat.

Translated from Museon museum in The Hague, the Netherlands:

December 19, 2012

The Hague Geological Society shows discovery

A piece of a jaw which this summer was found by Barbara Marsman, a member of the The Hague Geological Society, on the ‘Sand Engine‘ off the coast of Ter Heide, turns out to be a prehistoric hare. In the laboratory of Professor Hans van der Plicht, of the University of Groningen, the piece of bone was dated to an age of 31,000 years. “That means that this hare during the last ice age has walked between the mammoths on the current North Sea floor,” researcher Dick Mol of the natural history museum in Rotterdam says enthusiastically. The hare’s jaw is shown as a special exhibit in the Museon from 18 December 2012 to 17 March 2013.

Mol and paleontologist colleagues have found quite a lot of bones from the last ice age on the bottom of the North Sea. These were mainly of large animals such as mammoths, bison, horses and rhinoceroses. “But this is the first ice age are we know about from the North Sea floor. Never before have we been able to date a hare which has walked simultaneously with mammoths on the North Sea floor, “says Mol.

From the scientific description of the hare jaw:

Summary

For the first time we have been able to identify and date a jaw fragment with a few teeth of a lagomorph from the North Sea floor. The 14C age is 31,140 (+200, -190) BP, Late Pleistocene. In the absence of the hare’s characteristic third premolar (p3) it is not possible to distinguish between the species European hare, Lepus europaeus Pallas, 1778, and the snow hare, Lepus timidus Linnaeus, 1758.

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