Woolly hare
The woolly hare is a notably thick-furred species of hare found in the montane grasslands of western and central China, northern India, and Nepal. It has a wide range and is present in some protected areas but is a generally uncommon species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed it as a least-concern species, though it is considered endangered in India.
Taxonomy
The woolly hare was described in 1840 under the scientific name Lepus oiostolus by the British zoologist Brian Houghton Hodgson. The species name oiostolus is reminiscent of the Ancient Greek οὖλος, meaning.Several subspecies of the woolly hare have been described, though many have been discounted by later species accounts. After Hodgson's 1940 description of the woolly hare, he wrote an account of the species Lepus pallipes two years later, which would later be considered as the subspecies L. o. pallipes. Another species, Lepus hypsibius, was described in 1875 by William Thomas Blanford; he would reconsider this species, as well as Lepus pallipes, to be varieties of the woolly hare in 1898. Two subspecies—L. o. kozlovi and L. o. przewalskii—were described in 1907 by Konstantin Satunin as distinct species in the hare genus Lepus. Another subspecies, L. o. grahami, was described in 1928 by Alfred Brazier Howell. The woolly hare's systematics were clarified by Guiquan Cai and Zuojian Feng in 1982, when they noted the distinguishing characteristics of each woolly hare subspecies and added two new names, L. o. qinghaiensis and L. o. qusongensis. The species' subgenus is either Proeulagus, according to A. A. Gureev, or Eulagos, according to Alexander Averianov. The Yunnan hare, also part of Eulagos, was once a subspecies of the woolly hare. Studies on the ecology and physical characteristics of the Yunnan hare led to its classification as a separate species in the 1980s.
The third edition of Mammal Species of the World, published in 2005, reworked the woolly hare's systematics and placed it into four subspecies:Lepus oiostolus oiostolus Lepus oiostolus hypsibius Lepus oiostolus pallipes Lepus oiostolus przewalskii
A common characteristic between the various subspecies was that they were largely based on external characteristics, and little molecular analysis had been done to clarify differences between them. Additionally, it was unclear if there were any differences in geographic distribution between the subspecies. A 2016 species account noted that each subspecies was apparently present throughout the species' continuous distribution and that distinctions between them may be unreasonable. Two years later, another account was published that did not recognize any subspecies; this was maintained in the 2019 International Union for Conservation of Nature assessment of the species.