There was No Such Species as the Fugitive Deer (Sangamona fugitiva)

During 1920 Oliver Hay, a noted paleontologist of that era, named a new species based on a tooth discovered in a Tennessee Cave 35 years earlier.  He believed it was from an extinct species of deer, and he gave it the scientific name of Sangamona fugitive because he thought it may have been common during the Sangamonian Interglacial, though most specimens of this proposed species came from deposits dating to the Wisconsinian Ice Age.  For the next 60 years scientists assigned additional specimens found at fossil sites located in Tennessee, Illinois, Maryland, and Iowa to this species.  The fugitive deer was thought to be a species intermediate in size between a white-tail deer and an elk.  However, during the early 1980s a paleontologist by the name of George Churcher looked at all the specimens assigned to this species and determined they were actually the bones of white-tail deer, elk, or caribou.  Some were from large white-tails and others were from small elk, explaining why they seemed to fall between the range of the 2 species.  Churcher declared Sangamona fugitive an invalid species.  No such animal ever existed.  Taxonomists refer to this as a nomen nudem or naked name because it was assigned to a non-existent animal.

I was unaware of Churcher’s study when I wrote about the fugitive deer in my book and in a few of my earliest blog entries.  His paper is buried in the middle of an obscure special bulletin of the Carnegie Museum.  I did come across this paper a few years ago, but I never felt motivated to write about it until now.  I’m in the middle of researching future topics for my blog and ran into a delay with a couple I had planned, so I finally decided to note this old mistake that originated from a long dead paleontologist.

Most bones mistakenly assigned to the fugitive deer actually belonged to white-tail deer or elk.

The fossil record suggests there were just 4 species of deer living in southeastern North America during the late Pleistocene.  White-tail deer lived throughout the entire region.  Caribou and the extinct stag-moose (Cervalces scotti) periodically colonized the upper south during cooler climatic stages of the Ice Age.  Elk probably didn’t enter the upper south until 15,000 years ago.  Mule deer may or may not have occurred in western Arkansas.  A single specimen of the South American marsh deer found in Florida was probably a misidentified white-tail deer bone.  (See: https://markgelbart.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/sabertooth-cave-in-citrus-county-florida/ )

Reference:

Churcher, George

“Sangamona: the Furtive Deer”

Bulletin of the Carnegie Museum: Contributions in Memorial to John Guilday 1984

Tags: fugitive deer, George Churcher, no such animal as Sangamona fugitiva, nomen nudem, Oliver Hay