Abstract
DR. E. GOELDI has decidedly advanced our knowledge of the deer of South America by a memoir on the antlers of three Brazilian species recently published in the Memorias of the museum at Para of which he has charge (Mem. Mus. Goeldi, part iii., 1902). All South American deer, it need scarcely be said, differ markedly from the more typical deer of the Old World, the males of the larger species, together with their relatives, the white-tailed and the mule deer of North America, being specially distinguished by the form of their antlers, which branch in a fork-like manner some distance above their base, instead of giving off a brow-tine close to the latter. Hitherto naturalists, in Europe at any rate, have had no definite information with regard to the gradual increase in the complexity of the antlers of the South American species as they are annually renewed. This deficiency in our knowledge has been supplied in the case of the marsh-deer, the pampas-deer, and the one commonly called Cariacus gymnotis, in the memoir before us. With great pains, Dr. Goeldi has collected a large series of the antlers of each of the three species belonging to animals of different ages, and in the plates accompanying his memoir has figured a selection which serves to display the gradual evolution from the young to the adult form. In the course of the memoir, it is incidentally mentioned that the aforesaid C. gymnotis, which is a near relative of the North American whitetail, has only recently made its appearance in Brazil, its proper home being Colombia and Guiana.
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Dr. Goeldi on Brazilian Deer . Nature 67, 620 (1903). https://doi.org/10.1038/067620a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/067620a0