Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

sell them for food or Chinese medicine), or by developers (who destroy their habitats). "Tree-huggers use toilet paper. The biggest predator is the newspaper," he reasons. In 2004, for instance, black rhino hunting was reopened in Namibia: $150,000 a rhino, something Ken believes is good for the species. "Take away the value, and you take away the animal," he says.

Scientists believe that the Irish elk's antlers may have had something to do with their extinction. Exactly what that was, however, has been confounding people for centuries. One aspect they agree on is this: an astonishing amount of fuel is required to grow hundred-pound antlers in four months every year. One theory contends that the ecology of the land changed, becoming too densely forested for a hulking species adapted for life on the open plains. Another suggests that the elk's antlers "over-evolved," becoming too massive for its five-pound skull to support. Still other theories say that climatic changes and habitat loss from early humans (who also may have hunted the elk) made it impossible for it to find the phosphorus- and calcium-rich plants it required to regenerate new antlers every year. As a result, the species developed a type of osteoporosis and died out. This is the theory that most scientists adhere to today.

The first naturalist to write about the "large and stately beast" was Thomas Molyneux (1697). Molyneux got the story half right. He knew the elk had vanished from Ireland, but the idea that a species could go extinct was heretical at the time, and therefore unthinkable: God would never snuff out one of his own creations. Even Thomas Jefferson, a great fossil collector, would have to be convinced of something as controversial as extinction. Instead, Molyneux hypothesized that the elk was alive somewhere. Indeed, he claimed that the species had migrated to North America (where animals shrank), and people there called them moose.

The French were among the first to accept the concepts of both extinction and evolution—but they found these ideas mutually exclusive. The two leading naturalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck and Baron Georges Cuvier, were archrivals. Lamarck believed in evolution but not extinction; Cuvier believed in extinction but not evolution. Cuvier, the founder of vertebrate paleontology, was a "catastrophist." He theorized that animals dispersed and became extinct due to apocalyptic floods, earthquakes, and other global environmental disasters. An eco-soothsayer, Cuvier claimed in his four-volume Research on Fossil Bones (1812) that the Irish elk had died out during the last "great freeze" along with the mammoth. Recent radiocarbon dating of skeletal remains, however, has proved that the Irish elk survived the big freeze and lived with prehistoric humans into the early Holocene—three thousand years after the ice sheets receded, around seventy-five hundred years ago. Humans, it appears, may have done this beast in.

The Victorians found the Irish elk a most perplexing creature. They believed that its ever-evolving antlers were a liability and cited the elk as an example to disprove Darwin's theory of natural selection. Undaunted, Darwin said that the elk's antlers were not weapons but "splendid accoutrements" for attracting mates. In 1974, Stephen Jay Gould confirmed this theory: although the antlers did intimidate rival suitors, they were primarily three-dimensional aphrodisiacs used to lure females to the male's "lek" (a patchwork of territories it had staked out). Then, in 1996, Gould retracted that conclusion: giant deer did use their antlers in combat after all.

In 2004, a team of University College London biologists revised this portrait once again. They examined the DNA of the fossilized remains of two Irish elk from two widely different extremes of its geographic range (one discovered in the Ballynamintra Cave in Waterford, Ireland, the other in Kamyshlov Mire in western Siberia) and confirmed that its closest living relative is the fallow deer, not the red deer as previously believed. All of which brought these scientists, and now Ken, back to mating.

If the Irish elk was essentially a giant fallow deer, one can assume that it mated like a fallow deer. The fallow deer is one of the few species in which females, which tend to travel in herds, select their mates. Back to the antlers. Female fallow deer lust after stags with impressive racks, and alpha stags mate with as many females as possible, often fathering thirty to one hundred fawns a year. Ken described the situation like this:

"A fallow deer, when he ruts, during the mating season, has an area of ground he calls a lek. And what happens is, they flash their antlers and they attract cows like a harem onto this lek. If another buck or bull comes into that lek, they will force it off ... There's a confrontation, and they do a display, like a ritualized dance. The Irish elk is no different. He would use his horns to attract the females in and his body size to push his rivals off. That's the way it had to be. Natural selection favored big antlers and heavy bodies. Only the biggest, widest-antlered bulls would actually mate, so their genetics would always go in that direction."

This was the stag that Ken was re-creating. I was thinking about all this the next day when Ken and I drove to his studio to see his Irish elk in progress. Ken's studio is on an unpaved road next to the trailer where the Walkers lived up until six months ago. Approaching it, we saw an unkindness of ravens taunt a bald eagle, and a coyote dart over a hill just as Ken pulled over and lowered his window.

The studio is about the size of a two-car garage. That day polar bear feet, patches of kudu and wildebeest fur, and Kenneth E. Behring's skinned walrus head and tusks—all frozen solid—were scattered around the yard. We passed them to get to the door, which said WALKER STUDIOS. "I don't know if it's the best thing I've ever done, but it's the most fantastic," Ken said