Interesting, this would be one of the teporingos or volcano rabbits that were collected by Durrell on mt. popocateptl or one of their descendants born at jersey, since the Chapultepec zoo teporingo colony in Mexico city was just beginning or even in the planing stage in 1982.
This was one collected by Durrell. There were only two left at this stage, they were extremely shy and both were off-display. I was very fortunate to get the opportunity to see it - the keeper opened the door a little and I saw the rabbit, took the photo, and a moment later it dived into the log in the foreground and vanished.
@Carlos: were these the only volcano rabbits that were ever in a zoo outside of Mexico? From Hix's description it sounds like the attempt to start a zoo population of them at Jersey didn't work out.
Durrell made two collecting trips, bringing several rabbits back to Jersey on each occasion. They never settled down and, despite one or two young being produced, they all died within a few years.
In response to David, Chapultepec zoo sent vocano rabbits to Ueno zoo in Tokyo in exchange for a loan of their male panda to attempt to breed with the female pandas in Mexico city. In contrast to the loan of Chia Chia, the london zoo male panda, which was sucessful, the tokyo panda did not breed. Also the volcano rabbits in Toyko did not breed either. As Hix mentioned before, perhaps the teporingos only flourish in high altitudes. This surely is the only picture on the web of the teporingos collected by Durrell.
antwerpen zoo also had a small colony somewhere in the 70-ties or 80-ties ( I must have some reports on them writen by students ) but this colony also died out quite rapitly
