| Père David's Deer Temporal range: 3–0 Ma Late Pliocene to Holocene |
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| Conservation status | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Artiodactyla |
| Family: | Cervidae |
| Subfamily: | Cervinae |
| Genus: | Elaphurus |
| Species: | E. davidianus |
| Binomial name | |
| Elaphurus davidianus Milne-Edwards, 1866 |
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| Père David's Deer | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Chinese | 麋鹿 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Literal meaning | Elk-deer | ||||||||||||||||||
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Père David's Deer, Elaphurus davidianus, also known as the Milu (Chinese: 麋鹿; pinyin: mílù), is a species of deer known only in captivity. It prefers marshland, and is believed to be native to the subtropics of China. It grazes on a mixture of grass and water plants. It is the only extant member of the genus Elaphurus. Based on genetic comparisons, Père David's Deer is closely related to the deer of the genus Cervus, leading many experts to suggesting merging Elaphurus into Cervus,[2] or demoting Elaphurus to a subgenus of Cervus.[3]
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Adults weigh 150-200 kg (330-440 pounds), and stand about 45 in (1.15 m) at the shoulders. They have a nine-month gestation period, and one or two fawns are born at a time. They reach maturity at about 14 months, and have been known to reach the age of 23 years.
Père David's Deer has a long tail, wide hooves, and branched antlers. Adults have summer coats that are bright red with a dark dorsal stripe, and dark gray winter coats. The calves are spotted.
It is very fond of water, and swims well, spending long periods standing in water up to its shoulders. Although a predominant grazing animal, the deer supplements its grass diet with water plants in the summer.
The species is sometimes nicknamed sibuxiang (Chinese: 四不像, pinyin: sì bú xiàng), literally meaning "four not alike", which could mean "the four unlikes" or "like none of the four"; it is variously said that the four are cow, deer, donkey, horse (or) camel, and that the expression means in detail:
By this name, this undomesticated animal entered Chinese mythology as the mount of Jiang Ziya in Fengshen Yanyi (translated as Investiture of the Gods), a Chinese classical fiction written during the Ming Dynasty.
This species of deer was first made known to Western science in 1865, by Father Armand David (Père David), a French missionary working in China. At the time, the only surviving herd was in the Imperial Hunting Park near Peking, and belonging to the Chinese emperor.[5]
Some time after that, a severe flood destroyed crops and broke open the hunting park, and many of the deer escaped and were killed and eaten by starving peasants.
The last Père David's Deer that remained in China were eaten in 1900 or 1901 by Western and Japanese troops during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion. [6] That left the deer extinct in its native China.
Fortunately, before that, a few of the deer were illegally transported to European countries for exhibitional purpose, and bred there. After the remaining population in China was extirpated, the Duke of Bedford was instrumental in saving the deer. He acquired the few remaining deer from European zoos and nurtured a herd at Woburn Abbey. Threatened again by both World Wars, the milu were saved largely because of the Duke's determination to keep them alive.[7]The current population stems from this herd. These deer are now found in zoos around the world. Two herds of Père David's Deer were reintroduced to Nanhaizi Milu Park, Beijing, and Dafeng Reserve, Jiangsu Province, China, in the late 1980s. From the Dafeng Reserve, a third herd was established at the Tian'ezhou Wetland Reserve, Hubei Province in 1996. In spite of the small population size, the animals do not appear to suffer genetic problems from the genetic bottleneck. When they were assessed for the IUCN Red List (1996), they were classified as "critically endangered" in the wild, under criterion "D": "[wild] population estimated to number less than 50 mature individuals".[8] As of the latest assessment in October 2008, they are now listed as extinct in the wild.