Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2019

Nehalaennia, an 8 million-year-old rorqual
from the Netherlands, first described this year

As the year - and decade - approach their inevitable conclusion, it's time again to look back at a few palaeontological findings of 2019 that didn't, for whatever reason, make it into the regular Synapsida posts. As always, there is no theme to this list, just a sample of what seemed interesting linked only by when it happened to be published.

Pleistocene (Pt 5): Giant Deer and Woolly Rhinos

There were a number of Ice Ages during the Pleistocene, but the most severe of them all seems to have been the most recent one - the Last Ice Age. Or, perhaps more accurately, the Last Ice Age So Far, since there's no particular reason to assume there won't be another one along in a few thousand years time. This was the time when the earlier steppe mammoths were replaced by their more famous descendants, the woolly mammoths. But woolly mammoths did not live in isolation. With what other creatures did they share their world?

Even today, deer are relatively common animals in the wilder forests of Europe. In the Pleistocene, before the spread of farms and towns, they would have been even more so. At the height of the last Ice Age, however, there were relatively few forests in Europe, and many of the deer we are familiar with - red deer, roe deer, and so on - would have been sheltering in warmer climes. Reindeer and moose, on the other hand, were doing well, with the former, in particular, being widespread across the continent.

Throughout the course of the Pleistocene, however, there had been another kind of deer in Europe, one that is no longer with us. These were the "giant deer" of the genus Megaloceros. Some species, isolated on islands created by the rising melt-waters of the glaciers between the Ice Ages, were unusually small, but, in general, they had been getting larger as the Pleistocene went on. Before the last Ice
Age, the largest species, slightly bigger than the primitive moose of the day, had been M. verticornis. Now that was replaced by an even larger species, the Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus).