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The sexes can be distinguished from each other by the size and shape of their antlers. Male antlers grow more branching points and measure anywhere between 39 inches and 53 inches in beam length ...
Yet antlers are commonly retained through the winter and into the spring, [26] suggesting that they have another use. Wolves in Yellowstone National Park are 3.6 times more likely to attack individual male elk without antlers, or groups of elk in which at least one male is without antlers. [26]
Antlers grow very quickly every year on the bulls. As the antlers grow, they are covered in thick velvet, filled with blood vessels and spongy in texture. The antler velvet of the barren-ground caribou and the boreal woodland caribou is dark chocolate brown. [126] The velvet that covers growing antlers is a highly vascularised skin.
A deer (pl.: deer) or true deer is a hoofed ruminant ungulate of the family Cervidae (informally the deer family). Cervidae is divided into subfamilies Cervinae (which includes, among others, muntjac, elk (wapiti), red deer, and fallow deer) and Capreolinae (which includes, among others reindeer (caribou), white-tailed deer, roe deer, and moose).
Antlers typically measure 71 cm (28 in) in total length and weigh 1 kg (2.2 lb), although large ones can grow to 115 cm (45 in) and weigh 5 kg (11 lb). [8] Antlers, which are made of bone, can grow at a rate of 2.5 cm (1 in) a day. [ 11 ]
Both male and female boreal woodland caribou have antlers [12] during part of the year, although some females may have only one antler or no antlers at all (Boreal Caribou ATK Reports, 2010–2011). [33] On the males these grow so quickly each year that velvety lumps in March can become a rack measuring more than a metre in length by August.
The mule deer is the larger of the three Odocoileus species on average, with a height of 80–106 cm (31–42 in) at the shoulders and a nose-to-tail length ranging from 1.2 to 2.1 m (3.9 to 6.9 ft). Of this, the tail may comprise 11.6 to 23 cm (4.6 to 9.1 in).
A skeleton of a buck (male) exhibited at the Mammal Gallery in the Natural History Museum of Pisa University A pair of European fallow deer antlers. Only bucks have antlers, which are broad and shovel-shaped (palmate) from three years. In the first two years the antler is a single spike.