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...
Could it perhaps be a fungal growth on the velvet of the antlers.
ReplyDeleteHere 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...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2080434
Could be something like the Shope papillomavirus — pictures of wascally wabbits from the nightmares of HP Lovecraft here:
ReplyDeletehttp://ww2.lafayette.edu/~hollidac/jacksforreal.html
i think this is caused by damage to the bucks testicals,which causes hormone imbalance thus changing growth rate and shape of antlers.
ReplyDeletehope this helps
DEREK GREBNER WRITES: "The cryptid Illinois Project is going very slowLY as my schooling picks up and I run out of fresh sightings.
ReplyDeleteHowever 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."