One of the biggest deer to ever exist was the Irish Elk, also known as the giant deer or Irish deer. It was a species of extinct deer in the genus Megaloceros. Numerous skeleton remains that have been discovered in Irish bogs have provided information about the Irish elk. During the Pleistocene, it had a range that spanned all of Eurasia, from Ireland to Lake Baikal in Siberia. Carbon dating has determined that the most recent remnants of the species were found in western Russia around 7,700 years ago. Irish physician Thomas Molyneux, who identified large antlers from Dardistown, Dublin—which were reportedly frequently discovered in Ireland—as belonging to the elk , also known as the moose in North America, came to the conclusion that the animal was once common on the island and provided the first scientific descriptions of the remanants of the animal in 1695. With Alce being a spelling variation of Alces, the Latin word for the elk, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach gave it its original scientific name of Alce gigantea in his Handbuch zur Naturgeschichte in 1799. The male skull with extraordinarily massive antlers that serves as the holotype for Megaloceros giganteus ,by Blumenbach in 1799, was discovered in the Dunleer area of County Louth, Ireland. Thomas Wright originally observed and described the huge deer, which is now on display in Barmeath Castle. The Irish elk appears to have had a generally light coloration, with dark stripes running along the back, stripes on either side from shoulder to haunch, a dark collar on the throat and chinstrap, and a dark hump on the withers between the shoulder blades, according to Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings. The majority of Irish elk fossils come from the Late Pleistocene. The majority of the M. giganteus fossils that are known come from Ireland and date to the Allerød oscillation at the end of the Late Pleistocene, some 13,000 years ago. Ballybetagh Bog in Dublin has seen the discovery of more than such hundred distinct findings. But the Irish Elk was not just found there. The Atlantic Ocean in the west to Lake Baikal in the east made up the vast range of the Irish elk. They do not seem to have ventured northward onto the wide mammoth steppe; instead, they seem to have remained in the low-lying spruce, pine, and low-growing herbs and shrubs-covered boreal steppe-woodland settings. Another name for the Irish elk was given by Richard Owen in 1844, and he included it in the newly created subgenus Megaceros as Cervus (Megaceros) hibernicus. This has been hypothesised to be descended from Cervus megaceros, a younger synonym of the Irish elk described by J. Hart in 1825. Irish elk remains are few outside of the Irish Late Pleistocene, indicating that they were typically scarce in the locations where they did occur. The weighty bulk of the antlers, a maladaptation that made it particularly challenging for males to run through forests while being pursued by human hunters, or being overly demanding nutritionally as the vegetation composition changed have all been blamed historically for the extinction of the species. In these cases, the drop would have been influenced by did sexually selecting stags with enormous antlers
[Information and Image Credit : Irish_elk , Wikipedia]
[Wikipedia-Link : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_elk ] [Outdated 1897 reconstruction of doe and stag Irish elk by Joseph Smit]
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