American Big Game in Its Haunts: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club
History
American Big Game in Its Haunts: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club
Big game hunting -- United States
As we go north into British Columbia, through the headwaters of the
Peace and Liard rivers, the animal becomes very large in size, perhaps
larger than anywhere else in the world as far as his body is concerned,
and it is highly probable that somewhere in this neighborhood the range
of the giant Alaska moose begins. The species, however, does not show
great antler development in this locality, but for some reason the
antlers achieve their maximum development in the Kenai Peninsula.
In the Kenai Peninsula and the country around Cook Inlet, Alaska, with
an unknown distribution to south and east, we find the distinct species
recently described as _Alces gigas_. The animal itself has great
bulk, but perhaps not more so than the animals of the Cassiar Mountains,
to which it is closely related. The antlers of these Alaska moose are
simply huge, running, on the average, very much larger and more complex
than even picked heads from the east. These antlers, in addition to
their size, have a certain peculiarity in the position of the brow
antlers, the plane of which is more often turned nearly at right angles
to the plane of the palmation of the main beam than in the eastern
moose. In a high percentage of the larger heads there is on one or both
antlers an additional and secondary palmation. In the arrangement and
development of the brow antlers, and in the complexity produced by this
doubling of the beam, a startling resemblance is shown to the extinct
_Cervalces_, a moose-like deer of the American Pleistocene,
possibly ancestral to the genus _Alces_. If this resemblance
indicates any close relationship, we have in the Alaska moose a survivor
of the archaic type from which the true moose and Scandinavian elk have
somewhat degenerated. The photographs of the Alaska moose shown
herewith have this double palmation.
[Illustration: PROBABLY LARGEST KNOWN ALASKA MOOSE HEAD--KENAI
PENINSULA, 1899 EXTREME SPREAD, 78-1/2 INCHES--WEIGHT OF SKULL AND
ANTLERS, 93 LBS]
Several heads from the Kenai Peninsula ranging over six feet are
authentic; a photograph of the largest moose head in the world is
published herewith. This head is in the possession of the Field
Columbian Museum at Chicago, and measures 78-1/2 inches spread. The
animal that bore it stood about seven feet at shoulders, but this height
is not infrequently equaled by eastern moose. The weight of the dried
skull and antlers was ninety-three pounds, the palmation being in places
2-1/8 inches thick.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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