brand new designs are up on the edge redbubble werewolves spiders fedex amphibians proto crocs and more go check out the red bubble with links in the description and comment section below this video is inspired by and used darren nation's tetrapod zoology podcast blog post article on this topic as a main reference a link to said article is in the description and comment section below and i recommend you check it out once you're done here this is the megalosaurus a giant genus of deer with moose antlers the thing goes by a few names the irish elk giant elk or shelk but it is not an elk the thing survived longer than most of the ice age megafauna into the beginning of the holocene epoch about NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN years ago and was widespread across eurasia as far west as the iberian peninsula and ireland and as far east as russia and into china it was immensely successful with at least seven species known ranging in size from north american elk size to well over NUMBER_TOKEN feet NUMBER_TOKEN meters at the shoulders and as much as NUMBER_TOKEN kilograms NUMBER_TOKEN pounds the antlers are the most distinguishing feature and only the males carried them the biggest antlers were about three and a half meters NUMBER_TOKEN feet across and weighed the thing's head down a good NUMBER_TOKEN to NUMBER_TOKEN kilograms NUMBER_TOKEN to NUMBER_TOKEN pounds talk about weightlifting right surprised they didn't get the corpse grinder neck oddly enough this guy ain't the biggest deer which are of the family's survey yup the broad fronted moose serval sees latifrons was a bit bigger this guy was from pleistocene eurasia as well and reached NUMBER_TOKEN ft or NUMBER_TOKEN meters at the shoulders so not that much bigger despite only a slight difference in height it was much heavier at NUMBER_TOKEN pounds or a ton with the largest ones reaching a potential NUMBER_TOKEN pounds and NUMBER_TOKEN feet NUMBER_TOKEN meters at the shoulder megalosaurus may have seemed more imposing though as the cervalsi's latifrons only had an antler span of about two and a half meters according to dr naish's writing the antlers of the megalosaurus weren't particularly disproportionate compared to its relatives the fallow deer or even other modern deer like caribou in reindeer still those things were absolutely mahousiv in order to get to the meat and potatoes of this video the colors and patterns of the irish elk we need to take a quick journey through the current understanding of megalosaurus relationships oh genetic ones of course there are two schools of thoughts as to what the hell this big horny fellow is related to one is that it is most closely related to the red deer service alaphis the other school of thought uses morphological or skeletal characteristics plus hard genetic data to suggest a close evolutionary tie between the megalosaurus and the fallow deer damadama both myself with very limited understanding of the rigorousness of genetic data on extinct life forms and dr daryn naish whose opinion i value more than mine thinks morphology and genetic data probably have the upper hand in this debate that megalosaurus is more likely to be more
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN brand new designs are up on the edge redbubble werewolves spiders fedex amphibians proto crocs and more go check out the red bubble with links in the description and comment section below END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN