Living rhinos are generally associated with big horns, thick hairless skin and tropical habitats. But their ancestors didn’t always fit that description, with some living far up north and sporting luscious coats.
*The animals represented here are not to scale and don’t represent a direct line of descent, but rather plausible models for how this amazing transition happened.*
You may have seen my penguin evolution infographic. That one was done for funsies, but it was modeled after a series that I made originally for my Patreonthat I’ll be uploading on here! If you’re interested in stuff like this though, consider supporting me there; there’s a lot of other cool exclusive stuff to see.
Despite people in Canada/New England feeling a strong pride and sense of ownership surrounding moose,Europeans have the exact same moose. English speakers completely fucked up the naming conventions for the animal because we fuck EVERYTHING up.
The Eurasian elk is the exact same animal as the moose. It is Alces alces. Here is a depiction of a Swedish soldier riding a moose into war in the 1700s.
Figure 1. The Swedish army used moose as cavalry animals at various points in history. I don’t know what the armored boar is all about.
However, the English caused a lot of confusion by originally calling it an “elk.” This comes from the older English word eolc/eolh,which shares roots with elhaz/algiz, which, if you know your runes, is the antler-looking rune ᛉ.
So the English hadmoose, they just called them elks. But there haven’t been any moose in the UK since the Bronze Age, so the English just started using the word “elk” to apply to “really big deer” - and they forgot that there was a specific animal they used to call “elk.”
Today, modern people from the United Kingdom have overwritten their own understanding of “elk” with Elk (USA), which are wapiti (Cervus canadensis).
This is a wapiti, which everyone calls “elk” now:
Figure 2. The wapiti, or elk (Cervus canadensis)
“Hmmmmmmm,” British people may be saying right now. “That is a vaguely familiar animal. I feel like that is a STAG. I feel like it needs to be selling me a bottle of whiskey.”
YES. The wapitiis very similar to the UK’s red deer. This is what UK people call a “stag” :
Figure 3. A stag, or British red deer (Cervus elaphus) - actually slightly less red than the wapiti.
The explanation for this is that the UK colonizers found the wapiti in the USA, but the problem was that red deer were rarely seen by the common people at that time, so they thought they were Unusually Big Deer. And so the colonizing bastards said “Hey, what are these, Nigel?” and Nigel was like “IDK, stags?” and they were like “Yeah but they look really big, don’t they?” and Nigel was like “well, what about calling them big deer, then” and they called them “elk” which at that point had come to mean “big deer” in English.
Cervus elaphus (name meaning: deer deer) and Cervus canadensis (name meaning: Canadian deer) are very similar animals, and many people muddy the waters by calling Cervus elaphus an“elk.” The word ran all around the world, and American influence meant that it is losing its own definition in its own land.
Cervus canadensis are also found in Asia, where the subspecies are called wapiti, from the Shawnee word meaning “white rump.” This is to prevent confusion. If you see one in Mongolia, you must properly call it a “Canadian deer, aka ‘white butt,’ from the indigenous North American word” to prevent this kind of confusion.
Figure 4. The global range of Cervus canadensis, the wapiti, or elk.
Okay. Enough about what happened to the word “elk”. The point is that other European countries have reasonable amounts of moose, which they call elk. The “Eurasian elk” is Alces alces, the moose.
Figure 5. A Swedish army representative wearing Swedish flags and riding a Swedish moose. ALSO, SOMEHOW, THE MOST CANADIAN THING EVER
So when the English settlers colonized Canada and New England, they continued their long history of fucking the fuck up. But in the middle of this, they saw Eurasian elks, had no idea what they were, and went with the local Algonquin word “moose.”
Theyalsocalled the same moose “elk” at the same time, and went into a slight confusion where they tried to differentiate them into “grey moose” and “black moose” and “black elk,” but when the dust settled, the world was left with British-colonizers-turned-Americans applying random names to everything, and winning. Wapiti are now called elk, and now red deer are also kind of elk. Eurasian elk are now moose. Wikipedia attempts to explain the moose fuckups here and the elk fuckups here.
The word “moose” is Algonquin in origin. This is why it doesn’t pluralize like English words do. In English, the plural of “goose” is “geese” and thus many people feel that the plural of “moose” should be “meese.” However, “moose” is not an English word. If you wanted to treat it as one, you could remember that moose are hoofed animals of a specific class, and you could follow the rules already laid down for moose relatives: The English plural of elk is elk. The English plural of deer is deer. The English plural of sheep is sheep. You can call multiple moose “meese” if you want to. But that’s why it is the way it is.
Figure 6. The global range of moose, or Eurasian elk.
So there you have it. Moose are an important, scary and hilarious part of Canadian/New Englander culture, but they aren’t just ours - we share them with Eurasian cultures too.
Figure 7: a Russian moose farmer with a promising crop
Figure 8: Finnish people provide a dark warning. “Hirvikolari” is a specific Finnish word describing a road accident involving a moose. There are many dashcam videos of hirvikolari on the Internet.
And now think about all the amazing Moose News you have access to now! You can now enjoy stories of moose destruction, mayhem and general fuckery SO MUCH MORE when you realize they aren’t about deer:
Figure 9: every line of this story is perfect?
Actually, you know what?
That’s still the most Canadian thing ever.
I’M SO CONFUSED
(also, which one of them does Thranduil ride on?)
@shredsandpatches from how I remember the first Hobbit movie, I think it was a wapti?
A few people have asked this. Thranduil’s mount is a perfect Irish Elk (or more correctly, Irish Giant Deer), known as Megaloceros giganteus.
It’s a prehistoric giant deer, and not a close relation to the wapiti. (which is why paleontologists hope that we’ll start calling it an Irish Giant Deer instead of Irish Elk. TO PREVENT CONFUSION. IT IS NOT AN ELK!MOOSE OR AN ELK!WAPITI, IT IS A GIANT DEER. AND IT EXISTED.)
Figure 2. HOLY FUCK THE IRISH ELK.
Megaloceros went extinct about… 7000 years ago, and certainly did once coexist with humans. There is a potential Folklore Ghost in the Irish word segh and the German work Schelch suggesting that Europeans may have kept their word for it, similarly to how the word aurochs is still extant, despite the Giant Fucking Killer Bull now being extinct. Anyway, it was definitely an animal and the prehistoric Europeans, Asians and North Africans who knew it definitely noticed it and thought about it, the same way that we all once knew mammoths. The Lascaux deer with palmate antlers was probably a Megaloceros.
Figure 3. HOLY FUCK THE IRISH ELK. Cave painting from Lascaux depicting a prehistoric deer with palmate antlers. Could be a reindeer, could be Megaloceros. The palms aren’t very reindeerish, though.
The LotR and Hobbit designers made the good decision of using prehistoric European animals as bases for the designs of the “fantasy animals” in the movies. Lots of fantasy designers do this. George RR Martin didn’t invent dire wolves, for example. The oliphants in LotR are based on prehistoric elephants, ditto and the orc’s war rhinos and the dwarves’ war pigs. The “wargs” aren’t actually dire wolves - which would be TOO CUTE AND BEAUTIFUL to be scary - but DinocrocutaorPachycrocuta, two kinds of giant prehistoric ancestral hyena.
Figure 4: Holy FUCK Dinocrocuta.
Anyway, it’s a good path to do down, because you can be incredibly lazy with the creature design, and take credit for all the cultural resonance it evokes. There is something about an Irish Giant Deer that just looks RIGHT, like EXTREMELY CORRECT AND PROPER, in a way that a made-up fantasy animal doesn’t always evoke.
Figure 5. Dire wolves weren’t actually that big. Smilodon (the sabertoothed cat) is smaller than a Cave Lion. Megaloceros is definitely big enough to ride, as is the spectacular wooly rhino, which always has my heart. The Aurochs (Bos primigenius) is there, looking fab.
And personally I think prehistoric megafauna are just so cool, and they just RESONATE. We spend all this time and energy inventing elves and aliens, looking to the stars and a fake fantasy past for cousins and creatures. Are there other humans out there that look like a different species but are still weirdly hot, and could we have sex with them? Are there recognizable animals that are like our animals, but with weird knobs and jaws?
But we did used to have them. We once had horse-sized war-pigs, giant wolves, lions the size of horses, elephants that bristled with teeth, armored beasts. We once had Other Human People, The Little People, the Neanderthals, with their own culture - and we totally slept with them. We had strange shamanic connections and early spiritual practices and ritual magic surrounding beasts, beasts that have only left ghosts. Because the world changed.
Figure 5. THE SCENE IN “BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD” WHERE SHE TOUCHES THE AUROCHS. I CRIED. IT FUCKING RESONATED. I MEAN THE AUROCHS IS MORE OF A GIANT PIG BUT IT RESONATED.
But that’s why Thranduil’s war mount is not a moose (IT’S NOT A FUCKING MOOSE LOOK AT ITS FUCKING FACE) and not an elk (WHAT KIND OF FUCKING ELK HAS PALMATE ANTLERS) but a VERY SPECIAL AND MAJESTIC MEGAFAUNA.
The original post is very long and informative, but the point is something I’ve been joking about for years.
Basically, it went like this:
American settler 1: Look at those herds of large deer! What do we call them?
Settler 2: Well, we do have large deer back in Europe called “elk”. Let’s call them that!”
Settler 3: The exact same animal is found here too. The ones with the big noses. These deer are completely different.
Settler 2: What do the natives call the big-nosed ones?
Settler 3: “Mos”, sir.
Settler 2: Moose it is! Meanwhile, we will call these new deer, “elk!”
Settler 3: -.-’
About figure 5 in the last post, that “rhino” isn’t actually the woolly rhino. It is an Elasmotherium.
The woolly rhino’s scientific name is Coelodonta. The Elasmotherium was also a rhinoceros, but isn’t called “woolly rhino”. The Coelodonta looked more like modern rhinos today, and was most closely related to the Sumatran rhino. (Also, fun side point, there is no evidence for the amazing horn of the Elasmotherium; it is purely speculative.)
But this is why I love more recent megafauna more than dinosaurs. They are so familiar and relatable, yet so awesome.
