The giant deer
Megaloceros carries antlers 3.6 metres across, the largest of any known animal.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 271 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 50 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
Megaloceros giganteus — neither exclusively Irish nor an elk — stands two metres at the shoulder and grows antlers spanning up to 3.6 metres and weighing 40 kilograms, regrown every single year at enormous metabolic cost. Its antlers were long used as the textbook example of runaway sexual selection producing a fatally over-specialised animal, an interpretation now largely rejected: it survived hundreds of thousands of years and disappeared with the rest of the megafauna.