Antlers Do What No Other Bones Can
In the 1980s, shortly before I was born, my father killed a male white-tailed deer in the woods of Oklahoma, harvested his flesh, and mounted his head. Years later, my brothers regaled me with the tale of Tony, as they posthumously named the buck. “Dad shot him,” they told me, with glee. “And then he made us eat him.” I hated the circumstances of Tony’s death. But I was also entranced. In the corner of the living room where Tony’s head was perched, his antlers stretched from wall to wall, tines arcing toward the ceiling. The bareness of the bone, embossed with wrinkles and bumps that I could touch if I stood on my toes, made me imagine all that the antlers might have been, had Tony survived.
My younger self was right to marvel. that do what no other tissues can. They weaponize naked bits of skeleton; they “grow faster than any other animal bone,” says Doug Emlen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Montana. At the height of spring and summer, some big-bodied, surpassing the pace of fetal formation and even . The pace is so speedy that deer must pillage minerals from other parts of their skeleton, only to cast their antlers away and sprout a new pair when the seasons turn once more.
