Of Moose, Megaloceros and Miracles

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Megaloceros giganteus, the regal, extinct Irish elk, sported the most impressive headgear of any known deer.  BY KAY HOLMES STAFFORD

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Are giant antlers evidence of evolution gone awry?

PEAT BOGS HAVE PROVEN TO BE among nature's most efficient vaults for the long-term preservation of organic matter. The peat marsh environment's near-neutral pH, high concentrations of bone-decalcifying minerals and subaquatic exclusion of oxygen combine to form a superb mummifying and fossilizing medium.

From peat bogs in northern Europe have come the Grauballe and Tollund mummies and other millennia-old human bodies so remarkably preserved that flesh and muscle, hair, even facial expressions appear almost lifelike. But perhaps the most intriguing remains to emerge from the bogs are those of a long-extinct Eurasian deer, Megaloceros giganteus, the Irish elk.

A mature Irish elk stag stood to more than seven feet at the shoulders, could weigh in excess of 1,500 pounds and carried antlers weighing up to 95 pounds and spanning as much as 168 inches from tip to tip. That's a spread of 14 feet. Think of it. The greatest spread on record for the North American elk is a comparatively humble 63 1/2 inches.

This outrageous headgear ranks as the most massive ever worn by any animal, extinct or living, almost doubling that of today's champion, the Alaska-Yukon moose. Early on, in fact, it was presumed from the palmate structure and great size of its antlers that the Irish elk was a moose.

The moose is still found across much of northern North America.

Why, then, was the creature dubbed an elk rather than a moose? Because "elk" (from the ancient Greek alee ) is what Europeans call the animal known here in North America as the moose. But no matter, for the extinct ruminant was no more a moose than it was an elk. What it was, some leading evolutionary biologists now believe, was an early relative of today's Eurasian fallow deer.

Further, the Irish elk was Irish only insofar as Irish peat bogs were the first to yield its remains; subsequently, many antlers and some entire skeletons have been exhumed from bog sites in England, Germany and many far-flung elsewheres. Because the Irish elk was designed for life in a temperate climate, it never wandered to the extremes of Siberia and on across the Bering land bridge to North America, as did the moose, caribou and red deer (the latter being the same species as our elk, or wapiti).

A male with large antlers is a genetically superior forager.

The Irish elk was at least a half-million years in evolving to the highly specialized form that flourished during the late Pleistocene epoch, a time of generalized giantism in mammals. In its final millennium, 11,000 to 12,000 years ago, it roamed in great herds across the Ice Age grasslands, living and lusting and reproducing its eccentric genes for a relatively short while before joining the silent ranks of the extinct. In its passing, the I great stag bequeathed the title of king of the antlered species to the significantly less well endowed moose.

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