Biggest. Antlers. Ever. Meet the Irish Elk
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. 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. Today we call it the Irish elk, or Megaloceros giganteus.
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. They were shed and regrown annually. The females were 10 to 15 percent shorter than the males, without antlers.
As a name, Irish elk is a double misnomer. The animal thrived in Ireland but was not exclusively Irish, ranging across Europe to western Siberia for some 400,000 years during the Pleistocene. 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 evolution of its most striking feature was driven by sexual selection; no survival advantages derived from such enormous antlers. “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.
For centuries, scientists thought the antlers were only for display, but two recent studies demonstrate they were also used for fighting. “By lowering their heads,” Lister says, “two rival males would interlock the lower parts of their antlers, and then push, twist, shove. The females would mate with the winners.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/irish-elk-biggest-antlers-ever-180977706/
