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New bovids from the Pliocene of Ethiopia
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11-07-2012 12:38am#1They include a new species of gazelle, Gazella harmonae, which seemingly had strange "spiral" horn cores, but unfortunately there are no pictures of it (or maybe there are but I have no full access
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http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2012.632046
Which reminds me, there seem to be quite a few of prehistoric antelopes and relatives, yet they are very poorly known (forever overshadowed by carnivorans and proboscideans). My question is, do you know about any interesting antelopes or other such creatures from the fossil record?
I only remember Megalotragus, the so called Giant Hartebeest:
And the European Gazellospira (did this look kinda like Gazella harmonae?)
Please add any others you know about :pac:0
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Weird thing, Ramocerus. It gave a damn about symmetry...
If we talk about prehistoric pronghorns there's plenty of bizarre ones, like Merriamoceros:
Or Hexameryx:
But I was thinking more of Old World, true antelopes/bovids, since they are even less known than fossil pronghorns...
Oh, what the hell, let's post them all XD
Oh and let's not forget cervids:
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Megaloceros giganteus?
OK OK it isn't an antelope, but deer are filling the same niche in a more temperate climate, and they do have a common ancestor somewhere in the dim and distant past.
By the way there is a great example of Megaloceros giganteus in the museum in Liverpool, a fossil that has had me fascinated since I was a little kid. Deer have no right to be that big or fearsome.
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Tell that to modern day moose:
Yeah all right, it doesn´t look fearsome here, but I hear they can be extremely dangerous sometimes even without any apparent provocation.
I agree tho that Megaloceros is difficult to top.
Other crazy prehistoric cervids (around the same size as Megaloceros) would be Eucladoceros ("bush-antlered deer") like the one in my previous post, as well as Libralces:
And Cervalces, the "moose-stag":
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Doing some more research I've found some pretty bizarre ungulates- not all of them bovids- from prehistoric Africa.
There was seemingly a gigantic sable antelope, Hippotragus gigas, but I didn´t find much on it. There was also of course Pelorovis, and another giant ox called Bularchus arok, which is described as having horns spanning like a "two lane highway" with "the rest of the animal proportioned accordingly". There was also a "bull sized" oryx with very long horns.
But what caught my eye most was the so called Afrochoerus, a kind of pig, with tusks that were initially mistaken for those of an elephant (!). The tusks are very bizarre but there seems to be controversy over their orientation.
If anyone has pics of Bularchus arok or more info on it or the other critters plz post
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