A giant deer skull fragment with parts of both antlers has joined a museum collection in Győr, Hungary. It came out of Danube sediment near the village of Nagybajcs. This year’s extremely dry summer had left the river unusually low there.
The bone belonged to Megaloceros giganteus, the extinct species often called the Irish elk. The Rómer Flóris Museum of Art and History now holds it. Mihály Gasparik, chief museologist at the Hungarian Natural History Museum, identified the find, according to the museum.
A donation from Nagybajcs
In its announcement, the museum calls the low water one of the few upsides of the drought. Shrinking rivers, it says, exposed finds that had stayed hidden for a long time.
The skull reached Győr through a donation from a local resident. Staff publicly thanked Lóránt Lakatos for handing it over. Photos released with the post show the fragment on a cloth-covered table, with its two broken antler beams spreading sideways.
Márta Nagy, the museum’s tourism officer, took the pictures. The text came from Beáta Szmodics-Tugya, a historian and archaeozoologist at the Thúry György Museum in Nagykanizsa. Nagybajcs itself sits on the Danube in Győr-Moson-Sopron County, in northwestern Hungary.
Antlers nearly 13 feet across
Giant deer carried the largest antlers of any animal known, the Hungarian museum says. Their span reached close to 13 feet (4 meters). London’s Natural History Museum gives a lower figure of about 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) across.
According to the London museum, the animals stood about 6.6 feet (2 meters) tall at the shoulder. Body weight could reach about 3,090 pounds (1,400 kilograms), the Győr post adds. Living red deer, by comparison, weigh about 350 to 660 pounds (160 to 300 kilograms).
Each year, males shed their antlers and grew a new pair. They used them in the mating season much as modern deer do. Both museums name the fallow deer as the closest living relative, so the popular name “Irish elk” is misleading.
Professor Adrian Lister, the London museum’s expert on extinct megafauna, ties those antlers to sexual selection. “Bigger antlers were probably more intimidating to other males and more desirable to the females,” he says. More than 20,000 years ago, early humans drew them on cave walls in what is now southern France.
Riverbeds hold Hungary’s specimens
In Hungary, giant deer remains mostly turn up in riverbeds, the museum explains. That helps explain why a season of very low water produced this find. Bones buried in river gravel can stay out of sight until the level drops.
Low water has exposed other relics in the region, including shipwrecks along the Danube in Serbia and Croatia and the houses of a flooded town in Montenegro’s Lake Piva. Ice Age fossils keep surfacing far from Hungary, too, such as a Pacific mastodon molar spotted in a California creek.
The Danube’s lowest summer
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre tracked the drought through the summer. In an August 12 update, it said the Loire, Po, Rhine and Danube had fallen to record low levels in August. Hungary appeared among the hotspots in its late-July data.
Critically low water disrupted Danube navigation, water supply and farming in Hungary and Romania, the agency reported. Low levels on the Danube and the Rhine also cut hydropower and nuclear output. The JRC blamed months of poor rainfall, made worse by repeated heat waves.
Shipping slowed and farms struggled along the same river that gave up the skull. The museum itself frames the find as a rare bit of good news from a hard summer.
From 400,000 years to 7,700
The museum dates the species’ appearance in Eurasia to about 400,000 years ago. It puts the probable extinction at around 7,700 years ago.
A 2021 study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B analyzed 35 ancient giant deer mitogenomes. It places the latest known records at about 7,660 years ago in eastern Europe and western Siberia. The authors found that genetic diversity fell during the Last Glacial Maximum, the coldest stretch of the last ice age.
Fossil sites thinned out over the same period. The drop in diversity, “coupled with a major contraction of fossil occurrences, suggests that climate was a major driver in the dynamics of the giant deer,” the authors write. Slow declines have been traced in other Ice Age mammals as well, including the American cheetah of the Yukon.
No radiocarbon age for this skull
The announcement gives no radiocarbon date for the Nagybajcs specimen. Without one, the animal from Nagybajcs could have lived 10,000 years ago or 300,000. The post gives no width for the antlers in life, and it says nothing about putting the skull on show.
The museum’s announcement was published on the Rómer Flóris Museum’s Facebook page.
In the same post, staff asked people to report archaeological or paleontological finds in the county’s rivers, banks and other natural waters. Remains of old structures count too. The goal, in the museum’s words, is to protect finds that surface because of the low water.
Photo: Márta Nagy / Rómer Flóris Museum
