![]() ![]() The specimen in the photograph is the Smithsonian’s oldest mounted fossil skeleton, first displayed in 1872. ![]() King Charles II of England had a set mounted on the walls of Hampton Court Palace, where they remain, and the skulls and antlers of Irish elk still adorn the walls of castles and lodges in Ireland today. Kings and nobles prized the giant antlers. Humans forgot all about this giant deer until the late 1500s and early 1600s, when Irish peasants, digging in bogs for peat to burn as fuel, started finding their fossilized remains. “It’s possible, but unproven, that hunting finished off the already doomed populations.” “In both places-Western Europe and Russia-Neolithic humans were showing up at the time of extinction,” says Lister. giganteus survived until roughly 8,000 years ago, when warming temperatures turned the semi-open country favored by the deer into dense forest. Worman and Tristan Kimbrell, who said the “ability to produce and nurse living young is strongly tied to the female’s nutritional status.” As landscapes turned to ice and tundra, herd sizes would have been reduced until the animals dwindled away. But the cold spell’s impact on females may have been the deciding factor, according to a 2008 study by C.O. “The males would have really struggled, having to grow those antlers every year,” says Lister. The giant deer required abundant, mineral-rich grasses, leaves and shoots, and such vegetation went into drastic decline as temperatures rapidly cooled. The animals died out in Western Europe during a time of rapid cooling known as the Younger Dryas, which lasted from roughly 13,000 to 12,000 years ago. Lister’s mapping, dating and pollen research show that the problem was climate change. Proponents thought the Irish elk’s antlers got too big and heavy, causing males to get tangled in trees and sink into bogs and lakes. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Irish elk was the textbook example of orthogenesis, the now-discredited theory that evolution proceeded in straight lines that could not be stopped, even when they led to disaster. Rex and the mammoth, yet relatively little was known about it, and much of that was wrong,” he says. “It was one of the most celebrated extinct animals, up there with T. Lister has spent more than 25 years of his career researching M. Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo ![]() The females would mate with the winners.”Įxtinct Irish Elk, Megaloceros giganteus. “By lowering their heads,” Lister says, “two rival males would interlock the lower parts of their antlers, and then push, twist, shove. “It was all about impressing the females,” says Adrian Lister, a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum in London, England, and a leading expert on the species.įor centuries, scientists thought the antlers were only for display, but two recent studies demonstrate they were also used for fighting. The evolution of its most striking feature was driven by sexual selection no survival advantages derived from such enormous antlers. Nor was it an elk it was a giant deer, with no relation to the European elk ( Alces alces) or North American elk ( Cervus canadensis). The animal thrived in Ireland but was not exclusively Irish, ranging across Europe to western Siberia for some 400,000 years during the Pleistocene. The females were 10 to 15 percent shorter than the males, without antlers.Īs a name, Irish elk is a double misnomer. The biggest males weighed 1,500 pounds, about the same as an Alaskan moose, and they sported the largest antlers the world has ever known-12 feet across, weighing almost 90 pounds. Today we call it the Irish elk, or Megaloceros giganteus. To modern eyes, it looks like an exaggeration or a parody, but it was an accurate representation of an animal that early Europeans knew well. Some 17,000 years ago, on a wall of Lascaux cave in southwestern France, an artist made a painting of a deer with fantastically elongated antlers. ![]()
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