Irish Elk, revisited

The Irish Elk has long stood in textbooks as an icon for ice-age extinction.

The giant deer with the massive 12-foot-wide rack was thought to be extinct by the end of the last ice age; the most recent fossils of the Irish Elk had been dated to 12,000 years ago, but new discoveries in Siberia show that the Irish Elk was living there until about 7,000 years ago….4,000 years later than previous fossil finds indicated.

This new information implies that the extinction of the Irish Elk was not as abrupt as previously thought, and will add to the ongoing discussion of the factors that may have caused the extinction of the animal, climate change, disease, hunting.

Science News 6 November 2004, p. 34

See Nature, Oct. 7, 2004, Anthony J. Stuart.