“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 This article is a selection from the June 2021 issue of Smithsonian magazine BuyĮxtinct Irish Elk, Megaloceros giganteus. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 The females would mate with the winners.” “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.
0 kommentar(er)
