Irish Deer Once Had Massive 12-Foot Antlers
- Mar 19
- 2 min read
One of the largest players of Irish natural history is the now extinct giant deer - Megaloceros giganteus - that's more commonly known as the Irish elk.
Clocking in at about 6.5 feet tall and weighing upwards of 1,500 pounds, the males boasted antlers over 12 feet wide. By comparison, modern elk have antlers that are about four feet across. These enormous Ice Age mammals were the largest deer in Europe.
More than 20,000 years ago, early humans were drawing giant deer on the walls of caves in what is now Southern France. It's hard to imagine they weren't motivated by awe. Standing two metres tall at the shoulder - the height of an average doorframe - these enormous deer would have been a captivating sight. Especially the males with their huge antlers up to three and a half metres in width. The earliest fossil record of the giant deer is from 400,000 years ago and the last fossil record is from 8,000 years ago.
“Despite Ireland being a tiny place, we have a lot of modern deer and a lot of giant deer deposits,” Paolo Viscardi, Keeper of Natural History at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin tells PopSci. “The depositional environment is just perfect and the preservation of these animals is incredible. There’s just this massive constant stream of giant deer turning up here.”
“The anatomy is just really interesting because they’re so big,” said Viscardi. “I’ve handled quite a lot of them and when you pick them up, you realize just how much they weighed. It’s really incredible that an animal not only grew this, but then walked around with it every day, on its head, and managed to use it to fight with.”
The enormous antlers of the giant deer were not only difficult to manoeuvre but also took a lot energy - and therefore food - to grow. So why did the species bother to grow them so big? Professor Adrian Lister, an expert on extinct megafauna at London's Natural History Museum, says these antlers became as big as they did because of sexual selection.
So, why did they disappear around 8,000 years ago? In some parts of Europe, they may have faced pressure from humans, as Neolithic settlements were beginning to expand when they went extinct. Humans removing a lot of vegetation could have put them under continued stress, but it was still glaciers and extreme cold that most likely led to their extinction in Ireland.
