Wolpertinger
Aliases: Wolperdinger · Rasselbock (Thuringian cousin) / Territory: Allemagne
Bavaria's taxidermy chimera — a hare with roebuck antlers, wings and fangs — openly manufactured since the 19th century.
The wolpertinger is Bavaria's official chimera: a mounted hare wearing roebuck antlers, duck or pheasant wings, a set of fangs, sometimes webbed feet — every taxidermist mixing the recipe to taste. It hangs in Bavarian inns and hunting lodges among the genuine trophies, and that placement is the whole mechanism of the joke: a fake displayed amid the authentic, with identical museum-grade solemnity.
The tradition took shape in the nineteenth century, when Bavarian taxidermists began assembling the mounts for sale to passing visitors — city folk and travellers to whom the beast's habits were recounted with a perfectly straight face. The accompanying folklore is a small masterpiece of regional humour: the wolpertinger shows itself only to pretty young women in the company of the right man, and is hunted by night at full moon, equipped with a candle, a stick and a sack — which is to say, the gullible were sent to wait alone in the cold, Bavaria's version of the universal prank Americans call a snipe hunt. The creature has kin across the German-speaking lands and beyond: Thuringia's Rasselbock, the Palatinate's Elwetritsch, Sweden's skvader — and Wyoming's jackalope, its transatlantic cousin.
The horned-hare imagery did not come from nowhere. From the Renaissance onward, European natural histories and cabinets of curiosities depicted a Lepus cornutus, for a time considered a plausible species. The modern explanation is well established: papillomaviruses give hares and rabbits genuine keratinous, horn-like growths. Really afflicted animals could thus anchor the image; nineteenth-century taxidermy only had to push it to the full chimera.
The wolpertinger never belonged to zoology: it is an artefact, documented as a fabrication from the start, and it is as an artefact that it is preserved. The German Hunting and Fishing Museum in Munich keeps an entire collection on permanent display, presented with the humour the subject deserves, and the creature remains a living motif of Bavarian commercial folklore — on beer steins, inn signs and at village festivities. For the archivist it is the cleanest of cases: here the 'specimens' exist by the thousand, and every one of them came out of a workshop.
+ Notable reports
// Bavaria
Bavarian taxidermists assembled wolpertingers — hares with antlers, wings and fangs — and sold them to visitors along with deadpan lore about the beast's habits. The commercial, prank-based tradition is documented as such from this period.
// Learned Europe
Naturalists depicted a 'horned hare' (Lepus cornutus) in treatises and curiosity cabinets — imagery now explained by virus-induced horned growths on real hares, and the visual groundwork for the Bavarian chimera.
// Munich, Germany
The German Hunting and Fishing Museum maintains a permanent collection of mounted wolpertingers, acknowledged as fabrications: the creature is curated as popular-humour heritage, not as a zoological specimen.
+ Leading rational explanations
- A taxidermy chimera manufactured and sold as a prank since nineteenth-century Bavaria
- Old horned-hare imagery explained by papillomaviruses, which cause real horn-like growths
- The initiation prank of the 'wolpertinger hunt', Bavaria's counterpart to the snipe hunt
- Commercial and tourist folklore kept alive by inns, breweries and village festivities
Status note
Class 5: a documented, openly acknowledged fabrication — every 'specimen' is an identifiable workshop composite, exhibited as such even in museums.
+ Frequently asked questions
- Is the wolpertinger real?
- No: it is a taxidermy chimera assembled by Bavarian preparators since the nineteenth century from hares, roebuck antlers and bird wings. The prank has been open from the start, and the 'specimens' can be admired at Munich's hunting museum.
- How do you hunt a wolpertinger?
- According to the traditional prank: by night at full moon, armed with a candle, a stick and a sack — and the beast only shows itself to pretty young women with the right escort. It is an initiation joke for the gullible, first cousin to the American snipe hunt.
- Is the wolpertinger related to the jackalope?
- In folkloric terms, yes: both descend from Europe's horned-hare imagery and rely on the same humorous taxidermy. The horn-like growths that papillomaviruses cause on real hares most likely inspired the original image.