There’s a whole subgenre of photographs in the archives that show groups of people posing with a dead animal. Sometimes these kind of sneak up on you. Here, for example, is a picture from the very first Campanile of the Biology Club. I looked at it for quite a while before I noticed the dead rabbit. It’s worth clicking and zooming in on this. There’s Julian Huxley in the back and his lab assistant Joseph Davies in the front. They both came here in 1914. Davies stayed at Rice after Huxley left, eventually earned his Ph.D. here and taught biology until his death, just as he was about to retire, in 1966. The guy second from the right in the bottom row is Hermann Muller, who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Medicine (he was by then at the University of Texas) for his discovery of the production of mutations by x-rays. (Here’s a pretty neat bio of him that mentions his childhood friendship with another early Rice faculty member.)
I have no information on the rabbit.
But that’s not the weird one. This is the weird one. Striking image, no?
The Rabbit Beast!!! It was created by Rice University scientists and still lives to this very day!
http://burndownblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/cryptid-creature-texas.jpg
I admit I hadn’t thought of that. Possibly an early x-ray experiment gone wrong?
Could it just be a rabbit from one of the hutches that used to be on campus?
I’ve seen the rabbit hutches somewhere – photo or map – the same place that I saw the second row of hedges, so that the rows of corn that they grew to feed the mules that pulled the lawnmowers were hidden.
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Don’t know if they are anywhere else on campus, but there are a few rabbits that live underneath the Continuing Studies building. They’ve been here for years. Last month when I got to work one morning there were three playing on the front lawn.