• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Mystery Of Moose With “Devil’s Antlers”: What Does Science Say?

November 24, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Have you ever heard of a moose with so-called “Devil’s Antlers”? Although it may conjure images of some monstrous misshapen animal lurking in the wilderness, the term actually appears to refer to a real phenomenon that further demonstrates how cool antlers are.

How to make antlers

If you look for this term online, you will find only a few references to it and annoyingly few verifiable images. However, the moose with Devil’s Antlers does appear to be real. It seems it is a colloquial term that refers to bulls that have grown abnormal and typically ugly antlers, which do not shed.  

Advertisement

Unlike cattle, sheep, and goats that keep their horns, moose – the largest member of the deer family (Cervidae) – shed their antlers every year. This is because antlers are not fused to the animals’ skulls in the same way that horns (made of bone and keratin) are. Instead, bull moose grow their antlers during the spring months and use them to fight and attract females (typical male stuff) in autumn. 

After this, the bulls shed their antlers which relieves them of up to 27.2 kilograms (60 pounds) of weight, and helps conserve energy through the cold winters. 

Antlers grow ridiculously fast. In fact, they are among the fastest growing tissues in the animal world. For instance, white-tailed deer antlers can grow around a quarter of an inch a day, whereas elk can grow theirs at around an inch a day. 

When a male moose reaches around a year of age, it will start growing its first antlers, which become more impressive and elaborate in appearance with each subsequent shed-and-grow cycle. 

Advertisement

When they start to appear, new antlers grow in a velvety skin that helps to nourish them. This process is triggered by increasing daylight which leads the animal to produce more testosterone. Then, around September, the bull experiences a further surge in this hormone, which leads to the moose shedding the velvet to reveal its spectacular bony headwear. 

However, in rare situations, this process goes wrong, and the animal grows weird, disfigured antlers that neither suit their purpose nor shed at the end of the mating season. 

What the devil is it all about?

The effect is caused by a lack of testosterone in the animal, caused by castration or some hormonal dysfunction. When it occurs, the moose will shed its existing antlers and then grow new and deformed ones that will not shed, as testosterone is needed to start this process. 

Advertisement

This phenomenon has several names depending on where you are. Within some circles in North America and Canada, it is referred to as Devil’s Antlers, but in some cases, especially when concerning deer, the antlers form tumor-like masses called “perruque head”. This latter name is derived from the fact that the failed antler looks like an old fashioned perruque wig. They are sometimes referred to as an “antleroma”, which combines the English word “antler” with the Greek “oma” for “tumor-like”. 

There are also what’s referred to as “cactus antlers” and velericorn antlers. Unfortunately, images of these antlers are rare to find and those that do exist are usually exhibited by animals that have just been shot, so we will spare readers the experience of seeing that. But a quick internet search will give you an idea. 

Interestingly, this bizarre phenomenon is not a new discovery. Aristotle even described it in his History of Animals, which was written in the fourth century BCE. 

So it seems the mystery of the Devil’s Antlers is not all that unusual after all, even if photographs of this bizarre form of growth are frustratingly difficult to come by. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Soccer – FIFA backs down on threat to fine Premier clubs who play South American players
  2. U.S. House passes abortion rights bill, outlook poor in Senate
  3. Two children killed in missile strikes on Yemen’s Marib – state news agency
  4. We’ve Breached Six Of The Nine “Planetary Boundaries” For Sustaining Human Civilization

Source Link: The Mystery Of Moose With “Devil's Antlers”: What Does Science Say?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version