Toronto’s Subway Deer Enigma Unmasked With DNA Analysis
It took nearly 50 years to work out the identity of a caribou-like fossil first discovered by construction workers.
In 1976, as jackhammers and backhoes carved a subway tunnel through the glacial clays beneath Canada’s largest city, construction crews unearthed a surprise: the partial skull and antlers of a mysterious prehistoric deer.
The fossil, lifted from an excavation pit near Islington Station on Toronto’s western edge, bore antler beams so thick and oddly horizontal that no scientist could match them to a living species. Eventually some paleontologists named it Torontoceros hypogaeus, meaning “horned Toronto deer from underground.” More commonly, it was called the Toronto Subway Deer.
But the specimen, estimated to be at least 11,000 years old, set off decades of debate. Was this animal a strange relative of caribou? Or evidence of an altogether different deer that hit an evolutionary dead end?
After nearly 50 years, the deer has given up its secrets.
Continue reading at The New York Times.
