The Irish or Big Horned Deer is an extinct mammal of the Giant Deer genus. It existed in the Pleistocene and early Holocene. Outwardly, this animal is very similar to a deer.
The Irish deer was the largest species in history. It was distinguished by its impressive size. Its body length at the withers was more than two meters, but the horns were an even more important feature. The distance between their tips was 3.5 m, and the span itself was about 4 meters. Outwardly, they looked like a shovel, at the top they were greatly expanded and had small processes.
The structure of the teeth, horns and limbs suggests that the animal lived in wet meadows, since with its gorgeous antlers the deer could not live in the forest, because of them it could not move freely.
Habitat
Previously, the deer lived in Europe, Asia, and also North Africa. Many skeletons have been found in Ireland. In the USSR, most of the remains were found in the North Caucasus, Kazakhstan and Crimea.
The reasons for the disappearance of the species
There are a huge number of versions about why the giant Irish deer became extinct. According to a recent version of scientists, it turned out that the animals simply died of hunger. This was shown by examining their teeth for the ratio of various isotopes of carbon and oxygen. This analysis allowed scientists to determine the dynamics of animal nutrition. As a result, it turned out that the amount of food that the animals ate had dropped sharply.
All this was facilitated by climatic conditions, the springs became much shorter. The reindeer had nowhere to migrate, and they became extinct due to the ice age.
Second version
Another version is that females always chose a male with more luxurious horns, as a result of which, as a result of natural selection, individuals with large horns were born, which prevented them from eating normally, as they were too heavy. And also animals could not move normally because of the horns and could easily become prey for any predator.
The big-horned deer or Irish deer is an extinct species that belongs to the deer family, a genus of giant deer. Lived in Eurasia from Ireland to North Asia and Africa. He had great growth and huge horns, and therefore could only live in meadows, since in a wooded area he could not move because of his horns. The last remains of this species date back to 7700 years old and were found in Siberia. Most of the skeletons are found in the swamps of Ireland, hence the second name.
general description
This species has lived on Earth for the last few million years. It existed comfortably in Europe, North Asia, Africa and in some parts of China. The height at the withers of these animals reached 2.1 meters. The span of the horns between the extreme tips was 3.7 meters and weighed 40 kg. Body weight was equal to 540-600 kg. The largest individuals weighed 700 kg and even more. A large collection of Irish deer skeletons is at the Natural History Museum in Dublin.
Reasons for the extinction of the Irish deer
As some scientists suggest, large horns were formed as a result of natural selection. Males with larger horns gained access to the female. And so the horns grew from generation to generation. Eventually, they became so bulky that the animals could no longer lead a normal life and became extinct.
Other experts are of the opinion that the reason for the disappearance of the species was not the size of the horns, but the advance of forests on the treeless plains. As a result, the habitat has decreased, the amount of necessary food has decreased, and representatives of the species have gradually become extinct. As for the antlers, their size was proportional to the size of the body and weight, and therefore they could not cause the death of a huge number of large-horned deer. That is, there is no consensus on this issue, which is quite understandable given the huge time interval separating the modern world from that distant era.
The large-horned deer found in recent years on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea lived 7,700 years ago and have shorter antlers than those found in Ireland. This indicates intraspecific allometry. That is, smaller representatives of the species also had shorter horns. That is, we cannot talk about a constant increase in bone formations on the head.
Therefore, the big-horned deer most likely disappeared at the end of the last ice age as a result of environmental changes, contagious diseases and human hunting. Here we can talk about a whole complex of very different factors that, to varying degrees, influenced the animal and, in the end, led to its death. The same fate befell many other species of large mammals during this period.
Once upon a time, large-horned deer lived on Earth. They were majestic, graceful, slender animals, whose head was decorated with heavy horns.
The habitat of the large-horned deer - megaceros - was a huge territory stretching from modern Ireland (this is the reason for the appearance of other names of the animal - Irish deer or Irish elk) to the Altai Mountains. It seemed that nature itself rebelled against these handsome men with huge horns, the span of which often reached 4 m, and such a decoration weighed at least 40 kg. Every year the deer shed their antlers, and every year they grow new ones.
It must be said that usually the big-horned deer preferred to settle in fairly open areas. They did not live in the forests, since massive, highly branching horns prevented them from moving among the thickets of bushes. Peat bogs became another natural trap for deer. Usually, in search of food (tender young leaves of shrubs) and water, the animals passed by the swamps. Getting into the bog, male deer most often could not get out of it - heavy antlers interfered. The females had a chance to survive because they had no horns.
Why did animals need such large horns? It turns out, only to compete with rivals in mating tournaments. However, even then it happened that the spreading horns of two animals got tangled and they died. Naturalists and paleontologists have long wondered at the fact that deer needed antlers only to show off in front of females. In other cases, they only interfered with the animals.
Big-horned deer were contemporaries not only of mammoths, but also of humans. But, despite this, people hunted these animals a little. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to blame a person for the death of this species. Modern scientists see the reason for the disappearance of the Irish elk in the change in the landscape of the habitat of the deer. The fact is that over time, areas that were once open in the past were covered with dense forests, which led to a decrease in the number of megaceroses. Gradually, the species completely ceased to exist. Today people can no longer admire large-horned deer, animals that lived in Eurasia in the Pleistocene. Archaeologists often find the remains of Irish elk at the site of Paleolithic human sites.
Big Horned Deer SkeletonA number of scientists are nevertheless inclined to doubt that it was not man and his activities that caused the extinction of the species, since the disappearance of the big-horned deer in time is associated with the so-called Neolithic revolution. The reasons for it have not yet been precisely established. Therefore, it is difficult to talk about what was the real reason for the disappearance of the Irish moose: climate change or the predatory attitude of man to nature.
The first primitive species of mammals (alloteria, triconodonts, pantotheria) became extinct in the Cenozoic period. However, some of them have survived to this day. These are the well-known prototerian primal beasts - the platypus and the echidna.
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Reconstruction of a big-horned deer
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Skeleton diagram
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Notes (edit)
Literature
- Trofimov B.A. Fundamentals of Paleontology: Mammals. - M., 1962.
- Vislobokova I.A. The history of big-horned deer (Megacerini, Cervidae, Artiodactyla) / Ed. ed. Corresponding Member RAS A. V. Lopatin. - M .: GEOS, 2012 .-- 102 p .: ill. - (Proceedings of the Paleontological Institute / Russian Acad. Sciences; v. 293). - Bibliography: p. 91-100. [Ed. with the support of RFBR]. - ISBN 978-5-89118-598-2.
Links
Excerpt from the Big Horned Deer
It was becoming dangerous to stay in Vogucharovo. From all sides it was heard about the approaching French, and in one village, fifteen miles from Bogucharov, an estate was plundered by French marauders.The doctor insisted that the prince should be taken further; the leader sent an official to Princess Marya, persuading her to leave as soon as possible. The police officer, having arrived in Bogucharovo, insisted on the same, saying that the French were forty miles away, that French proclamations were circulating in the villages, and that if the princess did not leave with her father before fifteen, he would not be responsible for anything.
The princess on the fifteenth made up her mind to go. The worries of preparations, the giving of orders, for which everyone turned to her, occupied her all day. The night from fourteen to fifteen she spent, as usual, without undressing, in the room next to the room in which the prince lay. Several times, waking up, she heard his grunting, muttering, the creak of the bed and the steps of Tikhon and the doctor, turning him over. Several times she listened at the door, and it seemed to her that he was muttering louder than usual and tossing and turning more often. She could not sleep and several times approached the door, listening, wanting to enter and not daring to do so. Although he did not speak, Princess Marya saw and knew how unpleasant any expression of fear for him was to him. She noticed how dissatisfied he turned away from her gaze, sometimes involuntarily and stubbornly directed at him. She knew that her arrival at night, at an unusual time, would irritate him.
But she had never felt so sorry for her, so scared to lose him. She recalled all her life with him, and in every word, deed of him, she found an expression of his love for her. From time to time, between these memories, the temptations of the devil burst into her imagination, thoughts about what would happen after his death and how her new, free life would be arranged. But with disgust, she drove these thoughts away. By morning he was quiet, and she fell asleep.
She woke up late. The sincerity that occurs on awakening showed her clearly what was most of all about her father's illness. She woke up, listened to what was behind the door, and hearing his grunt, with a sigh told herself that it was all the same.
- But what should be? What did I want? I want him dead! She cried out in disgust at herself.
She dressed, washed, read prayers and went out onto the porch. Carriages without horses were brought to the porch, into which they were packing things.
The extinction of mammals at the end of the Ice Age - the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave bear and lion - has long attracted the attention of scientists and the general public. Over the past 15-20 years, a significant leap has been made in studies of the disappearance process of many representatives of the Pleistocene, that is, the fauna that lived up to 10-15 thousand years ago. This is due to the widespread introduction of radiocarbon (14C) dating of finds of extinct animals, often using the most technically advanced method of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). Recently, as a result of 14C dating of the bones and horns of an interesting and rather rare for Siberia mammal, the large-horned deer (Megaloceros giganteus), new data have been obtained.
This representative of extinct ungulates was a distant relative of the modern fallow deer, but was very different in size. The height of the big-horned deer at the withers was almost 2 m, but its "hallmark" were huge antlers, reaching up to 3.5 m in span!
Perhaps, among the deer that have lived in the last several hundred thousand years, another such giant is unknown to science. Bones and whole skulls with huge antlers from this deer have been found throughout Europe. Big-horned deer are believed to have lived in open landscapes, such as steppes or vast meadows in river valleys, and fed mainly on grassy vegetation.
In our work, we started from research carried out in the 1990s, which ended in 2004 with publication in one of the most prestigious scientific journals -. In it, the British-Russian team published new data on the time and place of the final extinction of the big-horned deer. Using 14C dating by the UMS method of dozens of specimens of this mammal from Western Europe (Ireland, Britain, Belgium), Scandinavia (Denmark and Sweden), Central and Southern Europe (Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and Austria), as well as from Eastern Europe and Russia, scientists for the first time received reliable data on the process of extinction of the big-horned deer throughout Eurasia.
It turned out that the "latest" (less than 10 thousand years old) representatives of this species lived not in Western Europe, as it was believed for decades, but in the Trans-Urals!
In this region, the remains of large-horned deer in peat bogs have been known since the end of the 19th century. The exposition of the Museum of Nature in Yekaterinburg presents the skeleton of an animal found during peat mining in 1886 near the village of Galkino (modern Kamyshlovsky district of the Sverdlovsk region, 130 km east of Yekaterinburg). However, without an accurate determination of the age of such finds, these data remained not entirely complete for a long time, and in the article of 2004 an unambiguous conclusion was made: in the Trans-Urals, the last representatives of this species died out only about 7.5 thousand years ago, that is, about 4 thousand .years later than in Europe.
This result became, in a sense, a scientific discovery, comparable to the discovery in the mid-1990s of very "young" mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Arctic, which survived there up to 4 thousand years ago. This work demonstrated that as a result of the involvement of 14C dating, it is possible to obtain fundamentally new data on the extinction of Pleistocene animals.
To obtain new data on the time and place of extinction of the big-horned deer in Siberia, an informal group was formed, which included archaeologists Vyacheslav Molodin, Alexander Postnov and Vladislav Slavinsky from the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch, paleozoologist Sergei Vasiliev from the same institute, geoarchaeologist Yaroslav Kuzmin from the Institute of Geology and mineralogy SB RAS, as well as a 14C dating specialist Johannes van der Plich from the Netherlands University of Groningen.
Siberia is located directly to the east of the known localities of Holocene, that is, younger than 10 thousand years, representatives of this species, previously studied in the Trans-Urals, but there are very few finds of a large-horned deer with a reliable age determined by the 14C method: until 2015, only four 14С-dates for all Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan.
And the fact that the big-horned deer lived here relatively recently was clear from the finds made by archaeologists at several sites of the Neolithic (New Stone Age) in the Baraba forest-steppe and in the middle reaches of the Angara River. When you look at the places of these finds, you can immediately see that if Baraba is located about 800-900 km east of the Trans-Urals, then the Angarsk sites are located at a much greater distance - up to 2,400 km east of the Trans-Ural locations of the big-horned deer. We set the task: to determine the 14C-age of the potentially "youngest" large-horned deer in Siberia.
The results of 14C dating carried out at the University of Groningen were very important.
As expected, it was found that large-horned deer lived in the Baraba forest-steppe up to 9 thousand years ago. But no less interesting were the data on the Angara, where no one had expected "young" giant deer before: it turned out that they lived here 10.5 thousand years ago.
Thus, it became clear that the patterns of extinction of this mammal are more complex than it seemed in the 2004 work.
Thus, we have established that one of the most recent habitats of the large-horned deer in Siberia was very large: its length from west to east was at least 2500 km. This habitat, and scientifically a refugium, that is, a refuge, existed up to 10.5 thousand years ago, when another population of the big-horned deer still lived in the British Isles and in Southern Scandinavia. The Siberian refugium decreased in size after 10.5 thousand years ago, but nevertheless reached a length of up to 1000 km in the period 9-7.5 thousand years ago.
As for the landscapes in which the last large-horned deer of Siberia lived, in Baraba forest-steppe vegetation favorable for them prevailed for many millennia, and most likely, these animals felt quite comfortable in the local conditions.
On the Angara, where coniferous forests grow today, we assumed the presence of open areas within the valley about 12-10.5 thousand years ago - these were floodplains, terraces and numerous islands in the river bed without forest cover, and here deer could easily find themselves food.
One of the most important and at the same time difficult questions in the study of extinctions is the degree of participation of ancient hunters in the extinction of representatives of the Pleistocene and Early Holocene faunas. Based on the data we obtained on the methods of breaking the bones of large-horned deer at the Angara sites, it was concluded that these animals were almost certainly hunted, which is quite natural: such an animal has always been a welcome prey!
Another important aspect of the work on the 14C dating of the bones of a giant deer on the Angara River is the rather ancient, not younger than 10-10.5 thousand years ago, the age of cultural layers with ceramics, which was also somewhat unexpected, since it was believed that in this part of Siberia, the first traces of pottery production date back to about 7100 years ago.
We managed to extend the “lifetime” of ancient pots in the Middle Angara basin by at least 3 thousand years. Of course, an in-depth analysis of these data from an archaeological point of view lies ahead, but already now we can say that they are worthy of publication in a serious international journal.
Our results allowed us to significantly expand knowledge about the extinction of ancient animals in Siberia. This is probably why the prestigious journal Quaternary Science Reviews with an impact factor of 4.6 was reviewed and accepted for publication in less than two months. Now you need to increase the amount of data in order to get a new quality again.
