The origins of the Rice University Cryptid, the Evan’s Hare, revealed. And it all began in 1916…
But a few weeks ago, I spotted an unidentifiable creature the claims the Rice University campus as its hidden home. Apparently similar to the Jackalope, this beast that I have deemed “Evan’s Hare” still remains loose, and largely a mystery.
Some have mocked my account of this hooved, unexplainable wunderbeast. However, the revealing spotlight of history should leave no question about the fantastical status of the Evan’s Hare, and its mysterious origins at Rice University.
It all began in 1916.
Rice University admitted its first class in 1912. In those early years, The Rice Institute, as it was originally known, spent considerable effort recruiting and retaining top minds in maths, sciences, and other fields. Some of those early names may still be recognizable to students today. Notably, Julian Huxley was one of Rice’s first professors.
Note Huxley, the first Director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, in this picture from Rice’s first yearbook.
While Huxley may be the most famous face in that practically centennial photographs, the man important for the story is Hermann Joseph Muller. Muller was recruited by Huxley to teach at Rice, where he continued some of the first genetic research. Notably this research focused on the Drosophila, aka, the fruit fly. But that wasn’t all of his work…
Muller may be better known for his 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was granted the award for “the discovery that mutations can be induced by x-rays.”
How convenient that the home of this rabbitesque mutant was where the father of radiation-induced mutations first cut his teeth as a full professor. But of course, that would be preposterous. It is not like there is a picture of Muller, and the rest of his scientific team, with a rabbit.
Oh wait there totally is.
Notice the little creature in front of Muller in the Campanile photo. Doesn’t it look a little familiar?
The connections are becoming apparent and the truth is being revealed. So is the Evan’s Hare a cryptid, or some mutant created by man? Or could it be both?
The Rice Historian comments that there is no information about the rabbit in the 1916 photograph. And indeed, there is little information about Muller’s time at Rice. Of course, why would they want to advertise this man. Sure, he won the Nobel Prize. But he also had explicit Communist sympathies and worked closely with scientists from the USSR. Muller also was involved in the illegal leftist student newspaper, The Spark. So perhaps Rice, as fitting Texas’ mid-century anti-communism, decided to cover up any ties with this pinko. And with those ties, evidence of his genetic experiments on rabbits.
So today, the offspring of his mutant creatures still roam the grassy quads and oak filled campus of Rice University.
Hermann Muller. A Frankenstein to rabbits. A creator to the Evan’s Hare. A father to the Rice Cryptid.