Post #2698915

Horses and zebras are about as closely related to each other as horses and donkeys are - and, just like horses and donkeys, they can breed and have hybrid (but sterile) offspring. Their last common ancestor lived about 4 million years ago. With hares and rabbits, it complicates things quite a bit that both groups are ill-defined. The entire Lagomorpha family tree (to which they both belong, together with the one living species of pika) is basically a poorly sorted heap of animals that the terms "hare" and "rabbit" have been rather haphazardly applied. There is even one kind of "hare" that *is* indisputably a rabbit: The Belgian Hare is a domestic rabbit that has been selectively bred specifically to look like a wild European hare! The closest to a principled definition of "hare" vs. "rabbit" we can get cladistically is to define the genus Lepus as "hares", and all the others as "rabbits" - and in that case, we get a latest common ancestor that lived about 30 million years ago.