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Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

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Saturday, March 07, 2009

OK - what causes this?

Whilst rootling around in the CFZ Picture library yesterday for the pictures of what I have dubbed the `real` jackalope, I found more pictures that I had completely fogotten that I had, and I think that I shall post them, one a day, for a while...

Cop a load of this... What do you think it is? It is a white tailed deer, and it is from the same boozer-cum-museum as the `real` jackalope, but what the heck can cause such weirdly aberrant antlers?


This is not a competition because I don't know the answer, but I hope that someone out in bloggo land does...

5 comments:

Syd said...

Could it perhaps be a fungal growth on the velvet of the antlers.

Naomi said...

Here is an explanation of something called antleromas, but I cannot tell if what this article describes is the same thing the deer in the pic has...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2080434

Anonymous said...

Could be something like the Shope papillomavirus — pictures of wascally wabbits from the nightmares of HP Lovecraft here:

http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~hollidac/jacksforreal.html

wyvern said...

i think this is caused by damage to the bucks testicals,which causes hormone imbalance thus changing growth rate and shape of antlers.
hope this helps

Jon Downes said...

DEREK GREBNER WRITES: "The cryptid Illinois Project is going very slowLY as my schooling picks up and I run out of fresh sightings.

However I have recently been doing some research on one of my favorite animals as a hunter; The white tailed deer.

For some reason white tailed deer grow two very different kinds of racks; a typical rack which is very symmetrical having anywhere between from 2 points to on up to normally 12 points for a very old buck, normally the deer will get a new pair of points every year.

However the non-typical white tail rack is asymmetrical with odd numbers of points with abnormal sized points. This makes up a non-typical rack but what caused the rack to grow in such a way?

The answer is very simple but yet complex because of the huge amount of variables. The antler formation is caused by the amount of minerals consumed by the deer during its velvet period. Also a large part of the antler formation is genetics. These are two things that when they come together can foster exotic racks on deer.

Personally I just like a normal typical rack and would like nothing better than to see the 10 point buck that walked under my stand last year and hope that he is a 12 pointer by next season.

The combination of genetics and the amount of minerals that the deer eats contribute to the exotic racks."