Lepus cornutus

Horned hares were described in medieval and early Renaissance texts, both as real creatures and as farcical or mythological ones, such as by Rabelais in his Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre's 1789 Tableau Encyclopedique et Methodique was apparently the last major scientific work to include the lepus cornutus as a real animal.

In the biography of French scientist Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, it is related that in 1606 he visited a widow in Leuven who had two living horned hares, said to be from Norway, but that one of them had died before his arrival.

[9] Count Ludwig August Mellin was said to own the antlers of a horned hare, which were reported on and depicted by German naturalist Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber in 1792 in his Die Säugthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur mit Beschreibungen (Mammals in Illustrations from Nature with Descriptions).

However, this was a rodent (not a hare) and the paired conical bone protrusions on its skull were atop its snout forward of its eyes (not on its forehead nor towards the back of its head as illustrations portray for a lepus cornutus or jackalope).