Antlers

£2.40

A Birthday card featuring a fallow deer with velvet antlers and an imperious look, and text ‘Happy Birthday’

– Blank inside for your own message
– Printed in the UK on premium card stock
– Supplied with a white envelope

In stock

SKU: C0131 Category:

Description

Antlers

Antlers is a Birthday card featuring a fallow deer with an imperious look, and text ‘Happy Birthday’.  The way antlers grow is of course one of the signal differences between deer and antelope. Deer have antlers and antelope have horns. Antlers renew every year, and they branch like the branches of a tree. In contrast to that, horns are permanent. They are a sheath of horn around a bone core, and they do not branch. Classifying animals this way is useful. It helps you see what you are looking at more clearly.

In connection with my travels to Africa I have classified antelopes by tribes. That is to say, it helps me to know what I am looking at when the animal is in front of me.

I don’t need to go through the whole scientific classification of antelope from Kingdom to species. Rather than do that, I look at tribes. They are a good balance between being too far up and too far down the architecture of this part of the animal kingdom.

Tribes sit in the classification of animals below families and above genus, like this: Family / Tribe / Genus / Species

When biologists talk about a genus, they mean one or more species of animals or plants that are closely related to each other. The next step up is to tribes. That includes animals that are not that closely related but which share characteristics that put them in a group.

Antelope Classification For Practical Purposes

For practical purposes, tribes are a way to get into the biology of animals to see which are related. A good example ‘in the field’ is a hartebeest and a common wildebeest. It’s not so obvious from looking at them that they are related.

So to know that ‘under the skin’ they are related, helps to ‘see’ the animals in the wild. It puts a bit of depth into what you are looking at. It helps you to remember where they fit in the general scheme. That said, taxonomists are constantly reclassifying animals.

 

SKU: C0131

A fallow deer with velvet antlers and an imperious look, and text 'Happy Birthday'
Antlers
£2.40