![]() If large and intimidating enough, they could scare the bejesus out of other males before physical contact was made. (Antlers, by the way, aren’t the same as horns, which never fall off- except pronghorns, which are unique in other ways.) As tusks had, these new spindly structures likely manifested first as weapons, offering ancient deer fresh oomph to push and parry their rivals.Įven early on, males with heftier headgear undoubtedly had an edge-and the more open cervids’ habitats became, the more space their antlers had to balloon. Then, as the dense forests of the early Miocene gave way to grasslands and fields, the first antlers appeared, eventually replacing most deer species’ tusks. These toothy tussles often ended “in severe injury or death,” says Nicole Lopez, an evolutionary biologist who will soon begin her graduate work at the University of Montana. Males fought one another with tusks-effectively, ultra-elongated snaggle teeth-stabbing, gnashing, and slashing until their hides were freckled with punctures and their necks were striped with blood. Millions of years ago, the tops of the skulls of the earliest deer were entirely bare. Antlers are a proclamation, majestic enough to attract the attention of deer and humans alike-enough that we may be reshaping the appendages before our knowledge is complete. And scientists are still working to understand why deer annually jettison these “ improbable appendages,” the objects of our envy and one of the greatest energetic investments the animals make. No other mammals regularly discard and regenerate bits of bony skeleton like this. The pace is so speedy that deer must pillage minerals from other parts of their skeleton, only to cast their antlers away and sprout a new pair when the seasons turn once more. At the height of spring and summer, some big-bodied cervid species can sprout antlers at a rate of about an inch a day, surpassing the pace of fetal formation and even cancerous tissue growth. They weaponize naked bits of skeleton they “grow faster than any other animal bone,” says Doug Emlen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Montana. Antlers are crowning biological achievements that do what no other tissues can. The bareness of the bone, embossed with wrinkles and bumps that I could touch if I stood on my toes, made me imagine all that the antlers might have been, had Tony survived. In the corner of the living room where Tony’s head was perched, his antlers stretched from wall to wall, tines arcing toward the ceiling. “And then he made us eat him.” I hated the circumstances of Tony’s death. ![]() Years later, my brothers regaled me with the tale of Tony, as they posthumously named the buck. In the 1980s, shortly before I was born, my father killed a male white-tailed deer in the woods of Oklahoma, harvested his flesh, and mounted his head. ![]()
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