The story
Megaloceros giganteus, the giant deer or Irish elk, appeared about 400,000 years ago and lived across Eurasia, from Ireland to Siberia. Males had palmate antlers that spanned up to about 3.6 metres and weighed around 40 kilograms, the largest of any deer ever. The animal stood about 2 metres at the shoulder. Skeletons are common in Irish bogs and lake muds, where they were found long before they were understood, and the name Irish elk is misleading, since it was neither confined to Ireland nor an elk.
The huge antlers were a sexual display, used to fight and impress rivals. In the 1970s Stephen Jay Gould argued from allometry, how traits scale with body size, that the antlers were large because body size was large, not because of runaway selection that doomed the species. The animal died out in Ireland, with the Younger Dryas cold snap, about 10,900 years ago. In 2004 a team including Anthony Stuart and Adrian Lister showed that it survived in western Siberia until about 7,700 years ago. Cold, lost forage and hunting may all have played roles.
Why it mattered
- The Irish elk is a classic example in debates over sexual selection and the scaling of exaggerated traits.
- Its Siberian survival into the Holocene shows that Ice Age extinction was not a single event.
- The Irish bog finds helped early naturalists accept that species can go extinct.
Sources
- Pleistocene to Holocene extinction dynamics in giant deer and woolly mammoth Nature (Stuart et al., 2004)
- Irish elk Britannica
- Antler allometry, the Irish elk and Gould revisited Institute of Science and Technology Austria
Contested history
Consensus: The Irish elk lived until about 10,900 years ago in Ireland and about 7,700 in Siberia; why it vanished is debated.
- Irish elk Britannica
- Pleistocene to Holocene extinction dynamics in giant deer and woolly mammoth Nature (Stuart et al., 2004)
- Antler allometry, the Irish elk and Gould revisited Institute of Science and Technology Austria
Community notes
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