
Nuralagus is an extinct genus of leporid (the family of rabbits and hares), with a single species, Nuralagus rex, described in 2011. It lived on Menorca, one of the Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean during the Pliocene epoch. It is the largest known lagomorph to have ever existed, with an estimated weight of , nearly double the weight of the average Flemish Giant rabbit. It likely went extinct at the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition when Mallorca and Menorca were united as one island, letting the mammalian fauna of Mallorca, including the goat-like ungulate Myotragus, colonize Nural
Nuralagus is an extinct genus of leporid (the family of rabbits and hares), with a single species, Nuralagus rex, described in 2011. It lived on Menorca, one of the Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean during the Pliocene epoch. It is the largest known lagomorph to have ever existed, with an estimated weight of , nearly double the weight of the average Flemish Giant rabbit. It likely went extinct at the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition when Mallorca and Menorca were united as one island, letting the mammalian fauna of Mallorca, including the goat-like ungulate Myotragus, colonize Nuralagus habitat.
== Discovery == So far, all of the fossils have been found in fissure fill deposits in the northwest of Menorca, dating to sometime in the Pliocene. The material was originally preliminarily described by Pons-Moya et al. in 1981, who referred it to cf. Alilepus. The genus and species Nuralagus rex were described in 2011 in a full description of the material, which included the front half of a skull, as well as numerous isolated postcranial bones corresponding to most of the skeleton.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).