Igor Bukker

Until recently, brought up on positivism and materialism, zoologists and biologists laughed at the beliefs of their ancestors about the existence of a horned hare. Centaurs and other mythical monsters did not fit into the Procrustean bed of Darwin's theory of evolution. Life has outraged the egg-headed offspring of academic science.
The horned hare, or rabbit, is a mythical creature in the West of the United States called jackalope, in Bavaria Wolpertinger (German canned beer with the same name and corresponding image is sold in Russia). Cunning American traders at the bazaar are ready to hand tourists a stuffed animal of this kind for $ 35. For taxidermists, the exact same carcass can be much cheaper.

Conservative biologists gossip, they say, there can be no rabbits with antelope horns. Their more advanced colleagues object to them: even how do rabbits with the papilloma virus, which are very similar to horns, meet.
"Although there is no such mixture in nature, there is some truth in the legends," says Michael Branch, professor of literature and the environment at the University of Nevada and author of the book "On the Trail of the Jackalop: How a Legend Came into the World's Imagination and Helped Us Cure Cancer." "This legendary creature," Branch said in an interview with Live Science, "is indeed associated with the papillomavirus-infected horned rabbits that live in the wild."

In rabbits, horns do not naturally grow. But the rabbit papillomavirus can make them do it. Papillomaviruses are common in many species, Branch said, and each type usually affects a specific species.
When the papilloma virus infects a rabbit, it can cause a benign tumour to grow on its head, which sometimes resembles horns. Sometimes, a build-up of keratin, which forms nails and hair, grows on other parts of the body, but most often on the head. In some individuals, tumours can develop into malignant ones.

According to a study in 2015, published in the PLOS One journal, the American virologist Richard Shope (Richard Shope) found that rabbit papilloma virus shortly thereafter named Shope papilloma virus causes the infected rabbits grow traits that resemble horns. Until then, most scientists did not believe that a virus could cause a malignant tumour.
Despite anecdotal evidence that pathogens can cause cancer in birds, sceptical scientists certainly didn't think this could happen in mammals. The horned rabbit "gored" unbelieving slow-witted people from science. "This discovery has opened up many opportunities for research into other types of virus-induced malignancies, and ultimately for the development of a vaccine against them," he said.

In particular, it allowed researchers to begin creating an HPV vaccine that could reduce the risk of cervical and certain other cancers. Not all rabbits infected with Shoppe's papillomavirus develop horns, and not all people with HPV develop cancer. But in rabbits, the disease is often fatal. According to Branch, some kind of horns can interfere with the ability of animals to chew food, that is, they can die of hunger.
Two teenage brothers from Douglas, Wyoming, invented the horned rabbit. They lent their first product to a certain hotel owner back in the 1930s.
-- Pravda.ru