Drawing of the male (left) and female mouse deer of the species Dorcatherium naui, which lived eleven million years ago in what is now Germany’s Allgäu region.
Drawing of the male ( left ) and female mouse deer of the species Dorcatherium naui, which lived eleven million years ago in what is now Germany's Allgäu region. Mouse deer are among the smallest ruminants in the world. Today, they live in the tropics of Africa and Asia and are barely larger than hares. Males and females differ little in appearance. But that was not the case about eleven million years ago. Josephina Hartung and Professor Madelaine Böhme from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen came across a previously unknown difference between the sexes while examining two fossil mouse deer skulls from the Hammerschmiede clay pit in the Allgäu region of Germany. They discovered conspicuous bone ridges above the eyes on the skull of a male mouse deer; these ridges were not present in the females.
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