Free Republic

It’s not just a bad hare day. A rapidly spreading virus is causing cottontail rabbits to grow black, tentacle-like growths out of their heads, prompting warnings to steer clear of the mutated animals. The so-called Frankenbunnies have been spotted multiple times in Fort Collins, Colo. Resident Susan Mansfield told 9News she saw a rabbit with what looked like “black quills or black toothpicks sticking out all around his or her mouth.”

Lost to the outside world for a generation—and feared extinct—a small deer-like species with tiny fangs has been photographed tiptoeing through a dry lowland forest in southern Vietnam... The silver-backed chevrotain, also known as the Vietnamese mouse-deer, is about the size of a large rabbit, with a silver sheen on its rump. The creatures have tusk-like incisors, visible in the new photographs of the animals. Because chevrotains lack horns or antlers, and the fangs are especially long in males, scientists think the males use them to compete for territory and mates.

IQALUIT, Nunavut (CP) - A mysterious skull discovered on the edge of the Arctic Circle has sparked interest in what creatures roamed Baffin Island in the distant past, and what life a warming climate may support in the future. Andrew Dialla, a resident of Pangnirtung, Nunavut, says he found the skull protruding from the frozen tundra during a walk near the shore with his daughter about a month ago. The horned skull is about the size of a man's fist. It resembles a baby caribou skull, except at that age, a caribou wouldn't have antlers, researchers and elders have pointed...

See post 1 below

Nuns and Jews, cow warts and rabbit horns. The common link: they were all crucial elements in the search for the world’s newest vaccine. There are fascinating stories behind every advance in medicine, be it hand washing or brain surgery. But the 70-year history behind the creation of a vaccine against human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer, is more fraught than most with blind alleys, delicate moments, humor and triumph. Although cervical cancer is being beaten in rich countries thanks to Pap smears, it is still a great killer of the world’s poor. Fulminating tumors that can hemorrhage the womb...

The world lost the creators of two of its most celebrated bio-hoaxes recently: Douglas Herrick, father of the risibly ridiculous jackalope (half jackrabbit, half antelope), and Ray L. Wallace, paternal guardian of the less absurd Bigfoot. The jackalope enjoins laughter in response to such peripheral hokum as hunting licenses sold only to those whose IQs range between 50 and 72, bottles of the rare but rich jackalope milk, and additional evolutionary hybrids such as the jackapanda. Bigfoot, on the other hand, while occasionally eliciting an acerbic snicker, enjoys greater plausibility for a simple evolutionary reason: large hirsute apes currently roam...

ouglas Herrick, who gets both the credit and the blame for perhaps the tackiest totem of the American West, the jackalope — half bunny, half antelope and 100 percent tourist trap — died on Jan. 6 in Casper, Wyo. He was 82. The cause was bone and lung cancer, his brother, Ralph, said. Douglas Herrick lived in Casper, but it was in his hometown, Douglas, Wyo., that luck changed his life. In 1932 (other accounts say 1934, 1939 and 1940, but Ralph Herrick swears it was 1932), the Herrick brothers had returned from hunting. "We just throwed the dead jack...