The Giant Deer or Irish Elk and We Mean Gigantic

They lived until about eight thousand years ago and, yep, humans wiped them out too.

Apparently the small deer is the modern fallow deer so you see the scale.  Dayum, that is one gigantic grass eater when a man's head only reaches up to the animal's back.  They carried fleas so large they could eat your children.

(Ed:  is that true?)

Come on (larfs).


It severely sucks that we wiped out Mastodons and these exceptional beasts since it seems they would have made it if, well, they didn't taste like something we like.  We can't fault the hunters terribly since hunter gatherers don't have all that many options and it was another stage of cultural evolution which produced the agrarian farmers.  Those farmers came to Europe from Greece and Turkey and DNA evidence shows they remained separate in Europe from the hunter gatherer tribes for some centuries after they arrived.

That doesn't really get Greeks off the hook for wiping out incredible animals since they didn't come to Europe from Greece / Turkey until long after the giant deer was already wiped out.  I don't know when the agrarian cultural model came to Greece so conceivably they did their part to wipe out such animals as well.  Unknown.

It's probably not so likely they did participate since farmers make incredible forts to protect themselves and here's an unbelievable one in Acrocorinth, Greece:

Acrocorinth is said to have existed since 'archaic times' and it's easily possible it could be eight thousand years old in Greece but I don't know that and finding more is on you.  (WIKI:  Acrocorinth)


How it happened that giant deer died isn't so much important, maybe, relative to the fact they ever existed at all.  Those antlers are just magnificent.

It's not so much my purpose to teach anything but rather to share things I find particularly intriguing as I wander about in my wayward peregrinations.

Note:  my vocabulary isn't as deep as it may seem since I like to absorb words I didn't know if my Swiss cheese brain remembers them.  Memory will not happen if I do not use these words and you know how that works.

Opuscule is one I found today and an 'opus' is a major work which likely you know from music.  An 'opuscule' is the opposite and we can find many of those if we switch up to full editorial but our interest is in this huge deer or elk which we see as a definite biological opus.