Just like the Olympics, it happens every four years, and Google has marked this quadrennial occasion with its search engine doodle recognising February 29.
Showing one bunny jumping over another two, this cute doodle celebrates the Leap Year, which brought the Gregorian calendar into line with the solar year back in 45 BC.
Back then, there were 355 days in the calendar with an extra 22 day month every two years which spurred Julius Caesar into tasking his astronomer Sosignenes with making things a bit easier.
He came up with the idea of adding the extra hours onto one day. The last day of February was chosen because it was the last month of the Roman calendar.
Pope Gregory XIII coined the term “Leap Year” and declared that such a year could be divisible by 100 but not by 400. This means 2000 was a leap year, but 1800 and 1900 were not.
