368 MAMMALIA. 



but closely allied species. The typical C. giganteus is represented 

 by fragments in many Pleistocene river-deposits and cavern 

 deposits in England ; there are also remains of it in the Isle 

 of Man ; and the animal seems to have survived until com- 

 paratively recent prehistoric times in Ireland. 



The Irish deer is sometimes described as an elk, but this is 

 an erroneous determination ; for its antlers exhibit a brow tyne, 

 and the conformation of the nasal bones shows that the 

 extremity of the snout was not at all elk-like. The true 

 elk (Alces machlis), however, was a contemporary of the Irish 

 deer, and during the Pleistocene period it had a much wider 

 geographical range than at present. In Britain remains of 

 this animal, the largest of the surviving Cervidse, are known 

 from many localities both north and south and in Ireland ; and 

 there are indications of a still larger extinct species, Alces 

 latifrons, in the Cromer Forest Bed. In the North American 

 Pleistocene there is an animal apparently intermediate between 

 Alces and Cervus, named Cervalces americanus, and known by a 

 nearly complete skeleton in the Princeton University Museum 

 from New Jersey. 



The reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), like the elk, exhibited a 

 much wider distribution in the Pleistocene period than at the 

 present day. It wandered southwards in Europe as far as the 

 Pyrenees and Alps, where it was contemporary with the early 

 Palaeolithic hunter ; and its remains occur in Pleistocene and 

 later deposits throughout Great Britain and Ireland, while a 

 few solitary survivors of the species are recorded as existing 

 in Caithness so late as the 12th century. The fossil antlers are 

 as variable in size and shape as the antlers of the surviving race 

 in the north, the giant and dwarf forms being often curiously 

 mingled in the same formation and district. 



The giraffe is unique among existing artiodactyls, and is 

 the sole surviving representative of the family Giraffidae. In 

 early Pliocene times, however, an animal with teeth, neck, and 

 limbs remarkably like it, lived in southern Europe and Asia, 

 associated with several closely allied genera which seem to 

 have connected it with the primitive Bovidse. The family as 

 a whole is thus not clearly definable ; but the cranial roof is 



