In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the White Rabbit provides Alice the following advice on stories: “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop”, sound advice from the loquacious lagomorph.
This particular story doesn’t begin with rabbits, rather a minor obsession I have with collecting meteorites with interesting names. It doesn’t matter if it’s just how it rolls off the tongue like Millbillillie, or it’s ironic, adding Nothing to the collection, a 1:28 IID iron that is nothing short of hard to get your hands on (pun intended). Then there are the names which are eponymous in nature, like Bison, named after the city Bison, which is in turn named after the large shaggy bovine which lives in the area.
It is this latter subset that led me down the proverbial rabbit hole for which the article is titled. There are plenty of eponymous animal named meteorites in the metbul: horse, cat, beaver, dingo… but in looking closer at the eponymous names, I began to run across the odd writeup or two in which the animal was not part of the name but a key detail in the story of the meteorite. Take for instance, Clarendon (c) popping up when searching for horses. The animal is not in the name, it is in the writeup details stating: Frank and DeeDee Hommel of the Bar H Working Dude Ranch located northwest of Clarendon, Texas, were out riding on their property on April 6, 2015, and report that “their horses went crazy” when they approached a large unusual rock which turned out to be a 377 Kg L4 chondrite. Chasing that train of thought, I wandered further down the rabbit hole of meteorite research to see what animals have been major contributors to finds and thus have the most crossover with meteorites.
Like the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, the rabbit seems to be the runner-up from everything I can find. This article was already mostly completed when I stumbled upon the true winner, so it seemed fitting to keep with it and make it the first in an installation of themed articles. Tune back in in the future to find just which animal takes the top spot.
During my research to track down rabbit-related meteorites, I found I was not the first to take an interest in the crossover of what would seem to be two unrelated things. Rewind the white rabbit’s pocket watch some 50 years and you will come across an article published in Nature’s Vol 250, released August 30, 1974. The article is available online if you are interested in a full read. For those who just want the cliff notes, it covers the rapid explosion of meteorite finds in Australia from the mid-60’s to the time of the article’s writing. It attributes the uptick from a steady state of around 16 meteorites a decade back to the 1800’s to 80 per decade due in major part to the activities of rabbit trappers in the Nullarbor region. The article specifically mentions the impact of the Carlisle family, responsible for 24 out of 36 recent additions to the Australia Museum collection. The Carlisles were rabbiters who happened across meteorites out on the Nullarbor plain while moving over large distances on motorcycles in pursuit of rabbits. I assume at some point the meteorites became a primary target of their own.
Digging deeper, I searched for all the meteorites associated with the Carlisle name to see just what they came home with, besides rabbits. Some of the names on the list that popped up are luckier than a rabbit’s foot. The list includes two substantial masses of Mundrabilla at 840 kg and 800 kg, and Carlisle Lakes. If Carlisle Lake doesn’t ring a bell, it’s the comparator for what is now known as the Rumuruti group. Rumuruti itself was listed as a Carlisle Lakes-like chondrite (1993, MB75) up to its shift in 2000 to R3-6 in the NHM catalogue, so you can thank the humble rabbit for the birth of the entire Rumuruti meteorite type.
I would venture to say the luck of finding rare meteorites while in pursuit of the common rabbit that goes beyond the Carlisles. Besides the above-mentioned Carlisle Lake (1/9 classification), the list of Metbul returns for rabbits has some other niceties on it. There are 9 results on the querying, Rabbit Flat is the sole eponymous one, other rabbit-based find stories include a brachinite (1/65 classification), CK3-AN (1/3 classification) and a pallasite main group-an (1/16 classification). A Howardite and IIIAB iron, though less rare, are also on the list, with just a few ordinary chondrites, which I figured would be the bulk of the hits based on probability.
Metbul is not holistic in capturing the rabbit-related details in the history section. I was able to find four more rabbit-related rocks doing some hunting on the internet. Two of those four stick to the trend of rabbit meteorites being associated with more obscure classifications.
The first meteorite is Binda, and as far as I can tell, this is the first ever of the rabbit-related meteorites chronologically. Binda is a cumulative eucrite, while there are a lot of eucrites, 2065 in total, a mere 60 are broken out as being cumulates. C. Anderson and J.C.H. Mingaye in the 10th volume of the Records of the Australian Museum, published an article titled Description and analysis of the Binda meteorite, which includes a recounting of the recovery of the 5.4 kg single stone. Mr. Alick McCormack is credited with the find on the property of a Mr. Fraser, some four miles from the town of Binda. The writers associate the find with a meteor seen passing over the area of Goulburn and Crookwell, traveling Northeast to Southwest on the night of the 25th of May 1912. Though Metbul lists Binda as a find, it is likely under the current system better described as a probable fall (Yp). The authors detail the account as follows:
McCormack was engaged in rabbit trapping, and noticed what he at first took for a newly formed rabbit burrow; on tracing the furrow to its termination, he found the meteorite partially embedded in the ground. We may conclude, therefore, that the stone had fallen quite recently, a conclusion strengthened by examination of the meteorite itself, which is in a perfectly fresh condition.
The second meteorite is Crescent, a CM2 American witnessed fall from Oklahoma in 1936, making it 1 of 19 witnessed CM falls and the only without-a-doubt, rabbit-associated fall based on my research. Oscar Monning wrote about the fall and finding of Crescent in Popular Astronomy Vol 44, the year it fell:
The meteorites were recovered beyond the terminal cloud, not far from the town of Crescent, for which they will probably be named. The first one was picked up on the third day after the fall, in fresh condition, by a boy of about 9 named Eddie Gene Johnson, who was rabbit hunting.
The stone Monning was describing happened to be a 73g individual and the only freshly recovered piece, as the rest was found some seven weeks later. Quite a lucky find.
The third meteorite is the Mundrabilla. The one sans any number, many folks overlook the fact that Mundrabilla is actually a designated Dense Collection Area (DCA). The famous Mundrabilla is an Iron-Ungrouped with a total known weight of 22 tons, and it was not always known by that name. The first pieces were found in 1911 and went by the names Premier Downs I and II (not to be confused with Premier Downs 001 and 002, which reused the vacated DCA designation freed up by the naming consolidation of Mundrabilla irons. Besides the Premier Downs pieces, several other iron meteorites were renamed, including a 108g iron found in 1962 by a rabbit trapper named Harrison. Rumors persisted among the rabbit trappers in the area that a massive iron meteorite had been spotted out in the desert. It took three scientific expeditions in the area to validate such rumors. In April of 1966, two masses of 12.4 and 5.44 tons were identified and coordinates taken by geologists R.B. Wilson and A.M. Cooney. Many additional small pieces have since been recovered, some by rabbit trappers and others by meteorite enthusiasts.
The final meteorite is North Edwards, a Kern County, California L6. In an almost decade-old Daily Bruin article put out by UCLA, there is a reference to the UCLA Meteorite Collection procuring a meteorite found in 1976. The stone was reported to have been found by a rabbit hunter 10 miles north of Edwards Air Force Base. Isolating the California meteorites in the Metbul, then sorting by date and zeroing in on the Kern County meteorites, this would be the one.
It makes sense in a way that rabbits are an almost ideal meteorite adjacent animal. They inhabit open grassland, semi-arid scrub and deserts, which happen to be the ideal environments for preserving and finding meteorites. I have seen my fair share of rabbits on meteorite hunts from California straight across the continent to New Jersey. The encounters are typically a minor footnote to hours spent in the field, but a few times they have defined my memories of a particular hunts. So I can personally relate to the rabbits and meteorites connection.
The first occurrence that comes to mind is my hunt to make a personal Holbrook find. Over 100 years after the fall, the strewnfield is still producing finds of peas, which it is famous for. Wind and rain-based erosion re-expose peas out of the grassy tufts that constitutes the high terrain in the strewnfield. Unfortunately, this gift of meteorite replenishment is outpaced by the black-tailed jackrabbit population that replenishes the plentiful meteowrongs of the strewnfield, the ubiquitous rabbit dropping. At the right size and the right color for a Holbrook pea, I would venture that just about every Holbrook hunter has been fooled by one of these leavings multiple times per day, either poking them with a magnet stick or bending down for a closer visual examination, to the extent that their presence becomes a consternation.
Fast forward a few years, and while on a back road in the middle of nowhere, I was waved down by a local gentleman. After the usual pleasantries, he asked me if I liked rabbits, which was an odd and random question. Having had rabbits growing up, I said they were cool, and then he asked, “Well I have this bucket of bunnies and was wondering if you might want them”. He popped the lid off the bucket he was holding, and indeed it was full of baby bunnies. Being offered a bucket of bunnies was not something that was on my bingo card, and with several more days of hunting to do I certainly wasn’t in any position to be playing caretaker to a veritable warren of baby rabbits, so I had to respectfully decline the offer. To this day it’s one of the oddest encounters I have had out in the field.
Walk around hunting meteorites long enough, and you are sure to find some interesting and random things. While the typical trend has been for folks to pursue rabbits and find meteorites, the reverse occurred for me on my second-to-last hunt. I have found my fair share of bones while hunting, but this time I added a rabbit foot to the list of oddball things found. The find ranks right up there with finding a complete and articulated armadillo shell. Though not as unlucky as the rabbit, I can’t say the legendary good luck of a rabbit’s foot was any help to me that day, as it was another skunked hunt that turned up no stones. I imagine I will go the rest of my life without running across another rabbit’s foot again, but time will tell, and maybe in the distant future I’ll have an update for you all of a second rabbit’s foot find in conjunction with a meteorite recovery.
Well, we have come to the end of the story, so it’s just about time to stop. I enjoy researching all the eclectic details of meteorites, as you never know what will tie multiple seemingly random stones to one another. It has been a great way of keeping my meteorite wish list full of fun, and often challenging to get pieces. You might be asking, so how many of the rabbit meteorites do I have? Out of the 13, I have been able to track down and add a mere four, so the hunt is still on!
