Photo of the Day #73: Muntjac

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Deer are not the sort of animal you would normally expect to have fangs, but some of them actually do. Well, the males do, anyway. The Common Muntjac (Muntiacus muntjak, pictured above) is one such minuscule cervid, although the genus Muntiacus contains about ten species and many subspecies within each of the ten. The Musk Deer (Moschus sp.) is larger and the males of that species have even larger canines, but they belong to their own family (the Moschidae) and are not "true" deer. Speaking of muntjacs, though, as Darren notes in a recent post the Chinese Muntjac (Muntiacus reevesi) was introduced into England sometime in the last 100 years (the exact time that a wild population became established is difficult to determine) and has gained a foothold there, and the species doing very well in its European home.

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I guess it is important to point out that Musk Deer are considered a separate family from the cervids.

It is interesting that among the cervids, only the muntjacs (Muntiacus), tufted deer (Elaphodus) and water deer (Hydropotes) bear tusks, and these are exclusively Asian.

Not too sure about the prehistoric distribution of deer taxa with fangs and other related families, but I guess it might not be unreasonable to guess that fangs are a basal trait among cervids and their kin, and that these groups originated in Asia.

I am fascinated by musk deer, muntjacs, water deer and the like, since seeing a stuffed one in the "Haus der Natur" (House of Nature) museum in Salzburg as a child. I think this is because they are the nearest living equivalent to a sabertooth.

To make it more interesting, it seems that the antler-less, fanged Hydropotes and the near-antler-less, fanged Muntiacinae are derived from within antlered deer and probably had antlered ancestors. The muntiacines (Muntiacus and Elaphodus) are the sister-group to the Cervinae, while Hydropotes is part of the capreoline radiation that includes most of the American deer species as well as the moose and the roe deer (I've a tree up at Palaeos if you want details).

The musk deer, as Hai-Ren has already pointed out, is not a part of Cervidae, and recent phylogenetic analyses suggest it may actually be closer to Bovidae than Cervidae. This isn't as surprising as it may sound - the "small deer" form seems to be ancestral for ruminants, considering the living Tragulidae (mouse deer), which are the basalmost living ruminants, and a whole host of fossil deer-like families such as blastomerycids and gelocids.

As regards the distribution of canines in ruminants, it's worth noting that tragulids also have enlarged canines, as did the fossil blastomerycids and such. There seems to be this trade-off between horns and fangs in ruminants (at least, in those ruminants that still have canines), where as horns appear, fangs disappear, and vice versa. The little Mediterranean Hoplitomeryx, which for its size carried more weaponry than a Michigan militia member, managed to get away with having both.