Extinct Tiny Deer With Big Eyes Found in National Park

Researchers have identified fossilized remains found in 2016 as belonging to a new genus of extinct tiny deer.

The deer's skull was discovered at Badlands National Park in South Dakota in 2016 by Geoscientists-in-the-Parks intern Tiffany Leone. After examining the skull, researchers have decided that the deer belongs to a new genus. The research was recently published in the Proceedings of the South Dakota Academy of Science, according to a press release from the National Park Service (NPS) sent to Newsweek on Thursday.

The deer, which weighed only 3 to 5 pounds, lived 32 million years ago during the Oligocene Epoch, the NPS press release said. It was named Santuccimeryx after Vincent L. Santucci, the senior paleontologist and Paleontology Program Coordinator in the NPS Geologic Resources Division.

Newsweek reached out to the NPS by email for comment.

One of the deer's most defining features, aside from its minuscule size, was its large eyes. The orbits, or eye sockets, took up more than 60 percent of the deer's skull, according to the paper. The skull was so small that it could fit well within the palm of one's hand, according to photos from the NPS.

After studying the skull, lead researchers NPS Park Rangers Mattison Shreero and Ed Welsh determined that the deer belongs to the extinct family Leptomerycidae. The skull, the only one of the animal ever to be found, has features associated with two different genera of deer that lived 10 million years apart, prompting researchers to place the newly discovered animal in its own genus.

The newly discovered deer was described as having teeth similar to the Leptomeryx family but a skull that resembled that of the Pseudoparablastomeryx family.

The researchers commended Leone for notifying the proper officials when she found the skull.

"It's a really neat example with this paper to be able to highlight citizen science, because this is the only skull of this animal ever found," Shreero said. "And if somebody had walked away with it, or if they just hadn't reported it and it had eroded away, we would have never known about it."

The Leptomerycidae family of deer was the size of a house cat and lived in North America for roughly 30 million years before going extinct. The NPS said that the extinct family is a close relative to the mouse deer, a living species that inhabits tropical forests in Africa and southeast Asia.

On the other end of the size spectrum, three new extinct species of giant kangaroos were identified in Australia earlier this year.