Researchers have solved Toronto’s decades-old Subway Deer mystery
Can the Torontoceros be our official mascot?
After decades of debate in the paleontological community, researchers from Trent University and the Royal Ontario Museum have solved a fascinating Toronto unknown.
In 1976, construction crews working in the subway system discovered the partial skull and antlers of an unidentified creature, close to Islington station.
For years, scientists were unable to match the fossil to a living species, due to its “thick and oddly horizontal” antler beams, according to a New York Times report published this week. This prehistoric enigma, which remains held at the ROM, became known as Torontoceros hypogaeus—“horned Toronto deer from underground.” More commonly, it was nicknamed the Toronto Subway Deer, with little clarity about what it actually was.
Related: “I don’t even know how many dinosaurs I’ve discovered”—A Q&A with ROM paleontologist David Evans
Using ancient DNA extracted from the fossil, which is an estimated 11,000 years old, researchers were able to conclude recently that Torontoceros was closely related to the mule deer and white-tailed deer.
“Torontoceros most likely split from a tangle of evolving deer lineages around two million years ago and took shape as a distinct species,” says the Times story. “It roamed the open landscapes around the Great Lakes alongside mammoths, mastodons and other ice age giants. But as the climate warmed and forests overtook the plains, its habitat disappeared and, with it, nearly every trace of the species itself.”
The researchers’ findings were posted online last month and are expected to be published shortly in the Biology Letters journal.
It’s a truly astonishing discovery that makes one ponder the magnitude of time, history and all that came before. We can only imagine what scientists might find in another 11,000 years. Eglinton Crosstown construction should be finishing around then.
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
