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Domesticated bunnies may need a new origin story.

Researchers thought they knew when rabbits were tamed. An often-cited tale holds that monks in Southern France domesticated rabbits after Pope Gregory issued a proclamation in A.D. 600 that fetal rabbits, called laurices, are fish and therefore can be eaten during Lent.

There’s just one problem: The story isn’t true. Not only does the legend offer little logic for rabbits being fish, but the proclamation itself is bogus, according to a new study of rabbit domestication.
“Pope Gregory never said anything about rabbits or laurices, and there is no evidence they were ever considered ‘fish,’” says Evan Irving-Pease, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford.

He and his colleagues discovered that scientists had mixed up Pope Gregory with St. Gregory of Tours. St. Gregory made a passing reference to a man named Roccolenus who in “the days of holy Lent … often ate young rabbits.” The misattribution somehow led to the story of rabbits’ domestication.

What’s more, DNA evidence can’t narrow rabbit domestication to that time period, Irving-Pease and colleagues report February 14 in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Rabbit domestication wasn’t a single event, but a process with no distinct beginning, the researchers say. For similar reasons, scientists have found it difficult to pinpoint when and where other animals were first domesticated, too (SN: 7/8/17, p. 20).
Geneticist Leif Andersson of Uppsala University in Sweden agrees that genetic data can’t prove rabbit domestication happened around 600. But he says “it is also impossible to exclude that domestication of rabbits happened around that time period.”

Domestication practices were well known by then, Andersson says, and it’s possible that French monks or farmers in Southern France with a taste for rabbit meat made an effort to round up bunnies that eventually became the founding population for the domestic rabbit.

Ancient DNA from old rabbit bones may one day help settle the debate.

An amateur astronomer caught a supernova on camera during the explosion’s earliest moments, giving physicists a glimpse of a long-sought phase of stellar death.

Víctor Buso spotted the supernova from his rooftop observatory in Rosario, Argentina, on September 20, 2016, when he aimed his telescope straight overhead at spiral galaxy NGC 613 to test a new camera. To avoid letting in too much light from the city sky — Rosario is a city of about 1.2 million people — he took a series of about 100 images that were each exposed for 20 seconds, spanning about an hour and a half.
Over the last half-hour of Buso’s observations, the supernova appeared and then doubled in brightness. In 2013, astronomers spotted a supernova within hours of its explosion (SN Online: 2/13/17), but this is one of the first to be spotted before it exploded.

Because there is no way to predict when and where a supernova will go off, this sort of observation is extremely rare, says astrophysicist Melina Bersten of the National University of La Plata in Argentina, who reports details of the supernova in the Feb. 22 Nature.
“This is completely unusual, and was something that many people were searching for around the world without success,” Bersten says. “It was incredible.”

Bersten and her colleagues analyzed the light from the supernova and found that it matches models of the first phase of a supernova called the shock breakout phase, in which a shock wave from a massive star’s collapse ricochets back from the star’s core and pushes stellar material outward.