Antler differences

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Tengu

Full Member
Jan 10, 2006
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Wiltshire
Moving on a bit from Horn, I am now learning the differences in deers antlers.

I aim to get a representative sample of all GB deers. Cast so I know they are full development.

The Chinese water deer are sooo uncoperative...

How do I tell Sika from Red, for example?

Or Muntjac from Roes..
 
Yes. Megalaceros. Sign me up for the De-extinction revolution...

That is helpful, Crosslandkelly...Now how do I find examples.

The Sika seems very problematic.
 
Ah. Always helpful to know.

Sometimes I find horn and antler bits at the car boot and have no idea what it is.

Recently I found the flattened ones are Reindeer...There was me thinking young Fallow!

Hence my interest in getting a set for reference....
 
i think Reindeer don't have palmate antlers Tengu. thier antlers are similar to Sika or Red deer - pointy
Are you thinking of Moose perhaps? they can grow very big (20Kgs each) but can also be quite small
 
I doubt anyone would mistake a moose antler, even a small one, for anything else.

Reindeer don't have much in the way of palmation. Rather less than caribou. If one were to find antlers in a UK car boot sale, chances are they are from a UK source, and if they show palmation then chances are very high they are from fallow deer. If someone at a boot sale told me that the particular antlers they were flogging were reindeer, I would take it with a double handful of salt!

Reindeer, typically, has much less in the way of a porous core than other deer, very dense, but you would have to be looking at sawn up sections to see this. Moose too is very dense, but on a whole other scale.

While you might be able to collect samples, I don't think they are necessary, or even necessarily your best bet for using as reference. Even within a species, looking just at mature specimens, there can be significant variation in form, shape and size. Best you can do is look at the antler to be identified and try to fit it to as many broad characteristics as you can. Doing a one to one comparison with your "reference" set might work, but how will you handle variations?

For telling the difference between muntjac and roe, you need no more than Google for images of the antlers or skulls of both and spend a little while looking at the dozens of example photos. They are very different.
 
Not palmate, really, the cross section is not round but what Smith, the authority on Reindeer remains in this country calls `compressed`

and I have found several artefacts of such shaped antler at car boots over the years...

You have a point, C Claycomb, there is variation, I will have to learn more
 
Small moose antlers have spikes with almost round crosscut, but larger ( older animal) have the large flat areas.
Same with reindeer, but those flat areas are proportionally much smaller and further down.
Useful when you make knife scabbards.

Males of both reindeer and moose get weirdly shaped antlers if their testickes are damaged.
The nicest crowns sit on prime bucks.

I have seen reindeer in captivity in UK, Sweden and Germany, and none had ’prime’ crowns.
Genetics?
 
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That is good. Walrod says that Caribou of different subspieces have different antlers...aerodynamics is very different on the tundra and in the forest.
 
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