The KU team also collects jackalope myths. Swearingen's favorites are two African stories, one in which the rabbit wants to fit in with the other horned animals and makes himself a pair of wax horns, which melted when he sat by the fire. The other legend has a rabbit loaning his horns to a deer and then never being fast enough to catch the deer and get his horns back. You hardly ever see jackalopes in the wild anymore, but they can still be found in a few old taverns, usually on a wall with other stuffed critters. Let me try to explain.
Mammals do strange things.
Imagine a lonely jack rabbit impregnating an antelope. At any rate, the jackalope is supposed to be a cross between the jack rabbit and the antelope, technically a pronghorn. It is difficult to be precise, as the species is so rare that even the Denver Museum of Natural History lacks a specimen. Jackalopes were a specialty of Red Fenwick, who wrote a Ridin' the Range column for The Denver Post for years. Fenwick was an expert on the beasts that apparently originated in his hometown of Douglas, Wyo., where a large jackalope sits smack in the middle of Main Street.