8 
British Deer and their Horns 
split as though for the extraction of marrow, and stone implements which have been found 
in conjunction with them in the caves of Ballynamintra, near Cappagh, County Waterford. 
Dr. Hart, of the Dublin Society, also cites the fact of the discovery of a human body 
in gravel under 11 feet of peat. It was in good preservation and completely clothed in 
antique garments of hair, which it was conjectured might be that of our fossil mammal. He 
also in his Memoir gives a picture of a perforated rib of a megaceros, the hole in which was 
supposed to have been made by an arrow. Both these arguments Sir Richard Owen 
discusses, and gives good reasons for his rejection of them. 
On the Continent, however, a skull has been figured by Cuvier which was found when 
cutting the Canal de l’Ourcq, in company with the tusks of Elaphus primigenius and 
bones of the aurochs which bore marks of the weapons of man. 
In the Journal of the Geological Society (May i860) Lartet states that at Aurignan the 
remains of this deer had evidently served for the food of man; whilst in the Geologist 
(No. 42), 1861, there is an account of a work by Admiral Wauchoppe in which he says 
that he had seen a stone hammer buried in the head of an Irish elk, and other skulls that 
had been similarly perforated. 
The next point to be considered is the cause or causes which led to the extinction of 
these great creatures. The bed of clay which covers the remains was evidently Arctic in 
its character, and it is believed by many that the severe climate, by destroying the supply of 
food, killed off these animals as well as the other large mammalia. Dr. Geikie, our great 
authority on the glacial period, is of this opinion, and Wallace, in his interesting Geographical 
Distribution of Animals (vol. i. page 150), gives us the following note :— 
“We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest and 
fiercest and strangest forms have disappeared ; yet it is a marvellous fact, and one that has 
hardly been sufficiently dwelt upon, this sudden dying out of so many large mammalia, not 
in one place only, but over half the land surface of the globe. We can but believe that there 
must have been some physical cause for this great change ; and it must have been a cause 
capable of acting simultaneously over large portions of the earth’s surface, and one which, 
as far as the Tertiary period is concerned, was of an exceptional character. Such a cause 
exists in the great and recent physical change known as the second glacial epoch. We have 
proof, in both Europe and North America, that just about the time these large animals 
were disappearing, all the northern parts of these continents were wrapped in a mantle 
of ice.” Many eminent geologists, however, differ from this view and assign a post-glacial 
date to our brick-earths, river-gravels, and cavern deposits. 
In an interesting paper read before the Royal Dublin Society in March 1878, Mr. 
W. Williams leads us to believe that the death of the animals was due to their being 
driven down the slopes of the lakes (which in the case of Ballybethag was 45 degrees), where 
they became mired in the adhesive clay, and that their carcasses becoming loose after death, 
they eventually floated off (probably driven by some storm), leaving the heads anchored, 
with palate to the skies, in the sands and gravels. 
Discussing this point recently with Mr. Williams, I gathered from him that, as the 
result of further investigations since his paper was written, he is more and more confident 
that his theory is correct. The heads he found in Loch Gur were nearly all upside down , 
