01

Is a Jackalope Real?

That direct answer is accurate, but it is not the whole case.

The jackalope is physically real as a taxidermy object, culturally real as American folklore, and biologically suggestive because actual rabbits can develop hard, hornlike growths. What has not been established is the existence of a naturally antlered rabbit species.

The history is more complicated than the standard debunking, too. The familiar story says the Herrick brothers invented the jackalope in Douglas, Wyoming, during the 1930s. But horned jackrabbits had appeared in American newspapers for decades. Mounted antlered rabbits were displayed before the Herrick story was documented. And the word jackalope does not become visible in the newspaper record we examined until around 1950.

The horned jackrabbit existed before Douglas. The jackalope, as a named and promoted Wyoming creature, appears later.

02

What Is a Jackalope?

A jackalope is a legendary animal of the American West, usually described as a jackrabbit with the antlers of a deer or pronghorn. The name combines jackrabbit and antelope, although the taxidermy version is often made from a cottontail rabbit and fitted with deer antlers rather than pronghorn horns.

It belongs to several overlapping categories. It is a cryptid because stories describe it as a rare animal that might still be found. It is a taxidermy hoax because the familiar mounted heads are deliberately constructed. It is a tall-tale creature because storytellers gave it impossible speed, dangerous habits, humanlike vocal abilities, and elaborate rules for hunting it.

Unlike legends that depend on sustained fear, the jackalope usually depends on play. The teller knows. The listener probably knows. The fun lies in seeing how long both sides can protect the possibility.

03

The Jackalope Origin Story Everyone Repeats

The standard story begins in Douglas, Wyoming, with two brothers: Douglas and Ralph Herrick. They hunted rabbits, practiced taxidermy, and supposedly created the first jackalope mount sometime in the 1930s.

In the best-known version, the brothers returned from hunting and left a dead jackrabbit on the floor of their shop. A pair of deer antlers happened to be nearby. When they came back, the rabbit had slid or been placed against the antlers in a way that made the combination suddenly obvious.

Ralph later recalled Doug saying: Let’s mount it the way it is.^[1]

The brothers allegedly sold the first mount for $10 to Roy Ball, who displayed it at the Hotel LaBonte in Douglas. The mount became a curiosity. The family made more. Douglas eventually embraced the animal as its own.

It is a perfect origin story. It has named creators, a precise setting, a visual accident, a memorable quotation, an early buyer, and a modest first sale that later becomes culturally valuable.

The trouble begins when we ask when the story was documented.

04

The Story Changes When It Is Retold

In 1977, Ralph Herrick described the jackalope as an accident. He and his brother Doug were late for dinner, leaving a rabbit beside a pair of antlers on the floor of their taxidermy shop. When they returned, Doug supposedly looked at the two together and said, Let’s mount it the way it is.^[1]

By 1998, the story had changed. In that version, the idea came from an unnamed friend during a rabbit hunt. The friend suggested putting deer antlers on a rabbit’s head, and Herrick—then taking a taxidermy course—followed through. The name arrived later, when an unidentified little boy reportedly called the creature a “jackalope.”^[2]

Those accounts can be made to fit together, but the sources do not fit them together for us. One presents a spontaneous discovery between two brothers. The other gives the initial idea to a friend and the name to a child.

Even the fate of the first mount shifts. The 1977 account says the mount remained at the Hotel LaBonte for roughly 43 years before being stolen in September 1977. The 1998 account says it disappeared only six months after it was sold.

The broad story may still be true. The Herricks made antlered rabbit mounts in Douglas and helped turn them into a Wyoming tradition. But the closer we get to the supposed moment of invention, the more the story begins to behave like folklore.

05

Horned Jackrabbits Before the Jackalope

Once I stopped searching only for the word jackalope and began searching for horned jack rabbit, the earlier record opened.

An 1885 Kansas newspaper used a horned jackrabbit as part of a joke about local civic boasting. In 1892, another Kansas paper reported that Bill Spencer had killed two: one allegedly had four horns, while the other had a single horn emerging near its nose. In 1900, a South Dakota report described a cottontail with uneven, pronged growths near the bases of its ears. The scalp was reportedly preserved as a curiosity.

In 1907, a seventy-year-old veteran named Calvin Young reportedly sent a three-horned jackrabbit scalp to The National Tribune. The newspaper said it displayed the specimen in its office for doubters. The growths were described as one horn between the eyes and two on the nostrils—an irregular arrangement very different from a clean pair of mounted deer antlers.

Some reports read like possible encounters with diseased animals. Others were already jokes. A 1908 Arizona column claimed Cave Creek jackrabbits had evolved their “rudimentary horns” to goring length. A 1911 Texas wire story proposed that horned jackrabbits had crossed with white-tailed deer. A 1927 report claimed one attacked and gored a dog.

These are not nine independent proofs of a hidden species. Newspaper fillers were copied, exaggerated, and syndicated. But they establish something historically important: Americans already knew what a “horned jackrabbit” was supposed to be before the Herrick story begins.

06

The Mounted Rabbit Before Douglas

The most important pre-Herrick image appeared in newspapers in late 1912 and 1913. One surviving reprint appeared in The Gordon Journal of Gordon, Nebraska, on February 28, 1913. It shows a mounted rabbit with branching deerlike antlers, reportedly taken near San Benito, Texas. ^[17]

Primary-source newspaper image February 28, 1913

Visually, it is already recognizable. Rabbit head. Upright ears. Branching antlers. Trophy presentation. The same simple silhouette that later became the jackalope.

We cannot tell from the image whether the specimen was a diseased rabbit, a deliberate taxidermy construction, or a staged photograph. But we can tell what newspaper readers saw: a mounted jackrabbit with deerlike antlers, nearly two decades before the Herricks’ claimed invention.

A second piece of contemporaneous evidence appears in April 1932. A woman entering a national Ripley’s Believe It or Not contest recalled seeing a snowshoe rabbit with six-inch, two-pronged antlers in the window of the Northern Pacific Railroad ticket office in St. Paul. A clerk reportedly said the animal had been captured in Idaho.

If the Herricks made their first mount in early 1932, this St. Paul specimen was being displayed at the same time—and there is no evidence it came from Douglas.

The familiar jackalope silhouette was already circulating in America before the Herrick origin story enters the record.

07

When Does the Word “Jackalope” Appear?

The object and the name do not appear at the same point in the record.

Antlered rabbits were already being reported, photographed, mounted, exhibited, and mailed as postcards. Yet searches of the available newspaper database did not reveal an indexed use of the word jackalope before 1950.

That is not proof that no one had ever spoken or printed the word earlier. Old newspaper databases are incomplete, and optical character recognition routinely misses unusual words. The responsible claim is narrower:

The timing matters. President Harry S. Truman traveled through Wyoming on a whistle-stop trip that year. Douglas, located east of Casper along the same rail corridor, used the attention to circulate a developed “natural history” of its local creature. Newspaper stories described a trapper named Roy Ball seeing the animal in 1829, its ability to imitate the human voice, and its habit of singing before thunderstorms.

These details were folklore, not recovered nineteenth-century records. But the publicity did something the scattered older reports had not done: it gave the creature a stable name, a hometown, and a package of repeatable stories.

08

What Douglas, Wyoming Actually Created

The evidence does not show that Douglas invented the idea of a horned rabbit. It does not establish that the Herricks made the first mounted antlered rabbit. And it does not securely document that either brother coined the word in the early 1930s.

Douglas’s historical achievement is still substantial.

The town and the Herrick family helped turn a scattered creature into a recognizable one. They standardized the body: rabbit below, branching antlers above. They produced mounts that could be sold repeatedly. They attached the animal to a specific place. The Chamber of Commerce surrounded it with hunting licenses, natural-history jokes, and stories that visitors could carry home.

The result was not merely a hoax specimen. It was a civic identity.

Wyoming later trademarked the jackalope name in 1965. In 2013, the state legislature named it Wyoming’s official mythical creature.^[8] Douglas erected a large statue, issued novelty hunting licenses, and continued the communal performance.

Douglas may not have invented the horned rabbit. It gave the creature a name, a standardized body, a hometown, and a publicity campaign strong enough to make the rest of the country remember it.

09

When Ronald Reagan Received a Jackalope

By the 1980s, the jackalope had traveled far beyond Wyoming gift shops and roadside postcards. It had become recognizable enough to appear in the private diary of a United States president.

On October 29, 1986, President Ronald Reagan traveled to Rapid City, South Dakota, for a campaign rally supporting Senator Jim Abdnor. After Reagan spoke at the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center, Abdnor presented him with a mounted jackalope head. ^[16]

“After my speech he (Jim) presented me with a mounted Jackalope head. I thought that was a purely Texas thing, but not so.”

Ronald Reagan, White House diary, October 29, 1986

Reagan’s surprise is a small but revealing detail. The jackalope was already nationally recognizable, but its geographic identity was not necessarily fixed. Douglas promoted it as a Wyoming creature. South Dakota produced and presented its own mounts. Reagan associated it with Texas.

The animal had become something larger than a single town’s invention story. It belonged to the imagined American West—a creature that could move from taxidermy shops and tourist counters into presidential memory without losing the joke.

10

The Real Horned Rabbits: Jackalope Disease

Searchers sometimes call it “jackalope disease” or the “jackalope virus.” The scientific name is Shope papillomavirus, also called cottontail rabbit papillomavirus. It can cause hard, keratinized tumors to grow from a rabbit’s skin, especially around the head and face.

The growths are not antlers. They have no seasonal cycle, no normal bone structure, and no place in a rabbit’s inherited anatomy. They are tumors. In severe cases, however, they can project from the face like black horns.

One of the clearest surviving examples is preserved in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The rabbit was collected north of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1955 and developed an extreme case of Shope papillomavirus, with hard growths projecting from its head and face.

The specimen helps explain why earlier witnesses reached for the language of horns. It also shows the difference between the biological animal and the designed jackalope. The tumors are irregular and pathological. The mounted jackalope replaces that disorder with a balanced pair of branching antlers.

Richard E. Shope published his research on infectious papillomatosis in rabbits in 1933. The work demonstrated a virus-induced cancer in a mammal and became foundational in the study of tumor viruses.^[6]

That scientific history eventually belongs to the broader research lineage that led toward understanding human papillomaviruses and developing HPV vaccines. It would be misleading to say Shope directly created the vaccine. His rabbit work helped establish that viruses could cause cancers in mammals—a finding with consequences far beyond the jackalope.

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science preserves an even earlier example. Its zoology collection contains a cottontail rabbit collected by C. M. Lighthouse in Logan County, Colorado, on November 16, 1919. Hard, keratinized growths project from the animal’s head, giving it the appearance of a horned rabbit.^[14]

The date matters. The specimen was collected fourteen years before Richard Shope identified the virus responsible for the growths—and before the Herricks’ claimed jackalope invention. People could preserve and display a genuinely horned-looking rabbit long before they understood what caused the condition.

Did the virus inspire the jackalope legend?

It may explain some historical reports. Descriptions of one horn, several uneven horns, growths on the nose, and projections across the face or body are compatible with papillomavirus pathology.

But resemblance is not transmission. We do not know that a particular naturalist, newspaper writer, hunter, or taxidermist saw an infected rabbit and then created a particular horned-rabbit story. Some accounts may reflect disease. Others may reflect copied illustrations, tall tales, deliberate taxidermy, or several causes at once.

Disease supplied the possibility. Folklore supplied the idea. Taxidermy supplied the final silhouette.

11

A Creature Older Than Wyoming

Long before anyone called the animal a jackalope, horned rabbits appeared in manuscripts, natural histories, paintings, and composite-animal traditions.

Lepus cornutus: the horned hare in natural history

Conrad Gessner’s sixteenth-century Historiae animalium is widely credited with an influential account of a horned hare reportedly found in Saxony. I was able to confirm the volume through the Library of Congress, but I did not independently locate the exact passage in the large Latin scan. That claim should therefore remain attributed rather than presented as a direct quotation.^[9]

Around 1575–1580, the Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel placed a horned hare among ordinary rabbits in Animalia Quadrupedia et Reptilia (Terra). The arrangement is almost more revealing than the antlers. The creature is not isolated as a monster. It is numbered and observed as though it were another biological variety.

This is how the horned rabbit repeatedly enters the record: not as an entirely unknown monster, but as a familiar animal with one impossible feature.

Al-Miʿraj: an older horned-rabbit parallel

A one-horned rabbitlike creature also appears in the cosmographical tradition associated with the thirteenth-century Persian scholar Zakariya al-Qazwini. The animal is now commonly called Al-Miʿraj. The image often reproduced online comes from a much later manuscript copy produced around 1750–1770, although the underlying work was composed around 1280.

Al-Miʿraj resembles the jackalope only in the broadest sense. It has a single long horn rather than branching antlers and belongs to a different cultural and literary tradition. There is no evidence connecting it directly to the Wyoming creature.

Similarity is not ancestry. The older images establish recurrence, not a single proven chain of descent.

What changed was not the animal’s basic shape. What changed was the explanation.

In Renaissance natural history, the horned hare could be treated as a rare species. In American newspapers, it became a freak specimen, hybrid, or dangerous curiosity. In taxidermy, it became a practical joke. In Douglas, it became the jackalope.

12

Jackrabbit vs. Jackalope

13

What Does Jackalope Folklore Say?

Once the jackalope had a name and a hometown, the stories multiplied.

None of these claims functions like evidence of an animal. They function as invitations. Each one gives the listener another way to participate in the performance.

14

Why the Jackalope Survived

The jackalope survives because it asks very little of belief and a great deal of play.

A frightening cryptid usually needs uncertainty: perhaps the witness was right, perhaps the photograph shows something, perhaps the woods still contain an unknown animal. The jackalope survives even after the construction is exposed. The visible seam between rabbit and antlers does not destroy the story. It is part of the pleasure.

Ralph Herrick understood this. In 1977, he said people became angry when told there was no such thing as a jackalope: They take it very seriously. And why make people mad?^[1]

I do not think that necessarily means everyone literally believed. The anger may have defended the game rather than the animal. To insist too forcefully that the jackalope is fake is to misunderstand the social agreement: you are allowed to know, but you are not supposed to destroy the possibility.

That is what Douglas offered visitors. The insider could smile at the hunting license. The outsider could pretend to take it seriously. A child could wonder whether one might exist after all. The creature made everyone part of the story.

The jackalope also has an unusually durable shape. It asks the imagination to accept only one alteration to a familiar animal. A rabbit is small, quick, and vulnerable. Antlers make it armed. The contradiction is instantly readable.

By the time the jackalope appeared on postcards, statues, fire trucks, hunting permits, bar walls, comic books, and state legislation, its history no longer depended on who made the first mount.

The page does not end by exposing the jackalope as fake. That is the least interesting thing the evidence tells us.

The more revealing story is how a creature can exist before it has a name, how a town can become remembered as the birthplace of something it may not have invented, and how a clean origin story can replace a messier—but more revealing—history.

15

Jackalope Evidence Ledger