Dale started at IUPUI hoping for a degree in Biology before changing to Anthropology and as a result, has a very diverse background in Geology, Zoology, Paleontology, Anatomy, Archaeology, Psychology, Sociology, Literature, Latin, Popular Culture, Film criticism, Mythology and Folklore, and various individual human cultures especially mentioning those of the Pacific and the Americas.He has a working knowledge of every human fossil find up until his graduation and every important Cryptozoological sighting up to that point. He has been an amateur along on archaeological excavations in Indiana as well as doing some local tracking of Bigfoot there. Now he is on the CFZ bloggo....
Back in the days when the ISC was still publishing CRYPTOZOOLOGY, there was some speculation that the large-antlered Scythian Deer from Classical-age artwork represented a survival of the "Irish Elk", Megaloceros. George Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures (2002) has an entry on this and notes that a late survival of the same type in Central Europe was possibly what was called a "Shelch."
While going through a site containing illustrations of petroglyphs from the High Altai mountains of Mongolia, I
found some more representations of what look to be the same thing.It sure looks like an Irish Elk to me.
The petroglyphs are from Neolithic to Sarmatian age, and so if that is what these petroglyphs represent, we have an indication that Megaloceros survived around Mongolia up to the Roman period at least.
The German epic poem Nibelungenlied (13th Cent, but dealing with events in the early Middle Ages) mentions an animal called a schelch, which some commentators think may have been the Megaloceros)
ReplyDeleteAccording to legend, Irish wolfhounds once coursed a species called a selg or "Irish elk," which may be a cognate with the German word that Ego Ronanus just mentioned.
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