There are about 70 living species of rabbits and hares. Scientists are still figuring out exactly how many rabbit species there are.
One thing that people agree on is that the last time an Omiltemi cottontail was seen was in 1904. That is until 120 years later in 2024.
Video footage of a small rabbit hopping about in front of a camera trap had scientists baffled. The juvenile rabbit had gray-brown fur and a black tail. It didn’t resemble any known species in the Sierra Madre del Sur, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.
Biologist Fernando Ruiz-Gutiérrez and ecologist José Alberto Almazán-Catalán went through their notes and confirmed that this mystery rabbit was the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit. The Omiltemi cottontail rabbit was thought to be extinct for the past 120 years.
The Omiltemi cottontail is reddish-brown in color. Its body and ears are smaller than those of other rabbits from this part of Mexico. The Omiltemi cottontail can be distinguished from its cousin the Mexican cottontail by its small black tail.
Omiltemi cottontails live in mountainous forests at elevations of 7,000-10,000 feet (about 2,100-3,000 meters).
“We’ve found areas with beautiful, pristine rivers, with an impressive quantity of crystal-clear water, with areas of very dense forest which are difficult to access and other areas where there is human intervention, but not very often. It’s in these places that we’ve had sightings of the Omiltemi rabbit,” says Fernando.
The rediscovery of the Omiltemi cottontail after more than a century was accidental. Fernando and his team were setting up camera traps along wildlife trails to monitor jaguars in the central portion of the Sierra Madre del Sur.
“We use the camera trap to identify the presence of jaguars, but also any associated fauna, that is, its potential prey and other felines with which they cohabit,” Fernando Ruiz-Gutiérrez says.
And then, one day in May 2024, a mysterious young rabbit appeared in front of a camera trap set up in the forest near the village of Jaleaca de Catalán.
“It really caught our attention because, when you compare it to other animals in footage from the same camera, the rabbit is tiny. We got a photo of a squirrel just opposite the place where the rabbit was and, when we put them next to each other, they were the same size,” Fernando says.
“This finding suggests that we still have a lot of fieldwork to do because although we think we have all the species documented, this really isn’t the case. We need to get more people involved, more specialists in this area,” José says. “It was a joy to behold this small animal and to discover that it’s there, alive, that it’s still hopping about, and we hope that there will be many more sightings and that it will continue to inhabit this region of the Guerrero mountains.”
David Brown adapted this story for Mongabay Kids. It is based on an article by Astrid Arellano, published on Mongabay News.
