A team of researchers from the National Museum of Natural Sciences has discovered in Murcia (Spain) a new species of giant deer that lived about 780,000 years ago during the early Pleistocene . The finding has been published in the magazine Mastia .
The cervid in question has been named Megaloceros novocarhaginiensis by the discoverer of the fossils, the researcher Jan Van der Made, who has also described remains of the Dama cf species. vallonnetensis, a deer that was already known.
According to paleontologists, the giant deer looked very similar to modern deer, except that it was almost two meters tall. Of the 153 fossils examined, Van der Made commented that “after comparing the fossils, which include antlers, teeth and limb bones, I found that, in the case of the deer, they did not match any of the species known so far . These discoveries help us to complete the evolutionary history of the cervid family ”.
Of the smallest species, 34 fossils were found in Cueva Victoria , a site located in Cartagena (Murcia) and thanks to the dating of the polarity fields of the Earth’s magnetic field, they determined that both species inhabited the Peninsula more than 780,000 years ago. .
“The magnetism of the Earth has changed several times throughout its history, these changes are reflected in sedimentary rocks and, thanks to these geological traces left by polarity changes and data on the evolutionary state of animal species, we can know the approximate age in which both species lived ”, concludes Van der Made.
