The Latin name for the Irish elk is megaloceros gigantius.

So I don't need to tell you, these guys were huge.

Enormous.

Six foot 11 at the shoulder.

An elk the weight of a moose.

And their antlers were big for their size.

Twelve feet across. The biggest sets of antlers in history, bigger than you could fathom,

could be practical. This animal went extinct probably within the last 10,000 years, and while there are many theories for their extinction that I think are more likely, natural climate changes, human hunting, you know,

the usual suspect from mammalian megafauna, there's one popular theory I think is way more

fun. And there might be some truth to it.

See, having antlers about the length of a Volkswagen Beetle isn't particularly practical.

It isn't particularly conducive to survival.

These enormous antlers helped to attract mates and maybe fight over them, but they wouldn't

have helped you run through the woods or search for food.

And, of course, they would have cost a lot of energy to build and maintain.

Heck, even carrying them would take a lot of investment. So the fun theory

is that the males with the biggest antlers had better mating success, which made females evolved

to prefer males with bigger antlers even more because they quote unquoteunquote want their sons to have bigger antlers

so their sons can succeed in the mating market,

which made the antlers bigger over time and so on and so forth,

repeat the process until the antlers got so big that it made male Irish elks

have such a hard time surviving that ultimately the species

...