Two Men Were Fishing in an Irish Lake When They Landed The Skull of an Enormous Extinct Beast

when you go fishing you hope to catch fish if that sounds like stating the obvious try asking any angler how many times they've actually hooked a rusty tin can or a discarded boot but when two Northern Irishman were fishing in lockni they didn't catch a piece of garbage instead they plucked something much rarer and more surprising from the depths the two men in question were raymond McElroy and Charlie Coyle and they were on an early morning trip to haul in their nets in particular from 4:00 a.m. the duo were at lockni which is situated near the northern irish village of Blair Ninh and MacElroy and Coyle had been hoping to land some of the popular yet elusive pollen a white fish that lives in five Irish Laos including Lough Neagh however what the pair had caught was something and even scares her supply what's more their discovery may only have added to the reputation of this particular stretch of water but Lough Neagh is not only special because of its population of pollen located about a 40-minute drive west from the Northern Irish capital of Belfast the Loch is the largest body of fresh water in the UK it covers 151 square miles in total and also provides some 40% of water to the Northern Ireland population meanwhile in September 2018 Coyle Weber count the story of what had happened on his and McIlroy's fateful fishing trip and up to a point it had apparently not been a successful night we were out fishing on Wednesday morning lifting nets and we had most of the Nets lifted Coyle revealed to the BBC Coyle continued then one of the nets got snagged on the bottom we thought it was an old tree or something and we couldn't get it up for a good while however the fisherman added and then finally after about five or ten minutes the Nets started to come up oil then proceeded to describe what the two men had seen as the net at last emerged above the surface he explained the net came to the top of the water and Raymond said that looks like an old oak tree the next thing we saw the head and he said to me it's an elk and I said it's the devil fortunately for all concerned McIlroy was right and Coyle was wrong the retreat item was indeed the astonishingly well-preserved skull in antlers of an Irish elk but what was truly startling about the discovery is the fact that the Irish elk has been extinct in the country for some 10,000 years furthermore the two men noted the elk skull about a mile from the lockni shoreline in a part of the Loch known as the thorns in place of murky myth in fact the whole of Lough Neagh has a rich history tall tales and fables as is the case with several areas of Northern Ireland one such story deals with the creation of the Loch according to legend the mythical Irish warrior finn mccool was hot on the heels of an unwelcome giant from Scotland grabbing a handful of Irish land McCool men flung the mud at the Giant and the huge hole left by the improvised missile is said to have eventually filled with water thus block Neath but the Irish elk was once very real as the approximately 8 foot wide set of antlers the fisherman found suggests sometimes called the Irish giant deer the Magnificent animals live not only in Ireland but could also be found roaming rights across Eurasia into what is now China and Siberia the Irish tag came about however because some of the species remains had been found in Irish marshes and bogs and the Irish Elks name is not only misleading in a geographical sense since the animal isn't even an elk in trying to make sense of the statement it is worth considering that the European elk or a moose in North America is an altogether different animal in fact the Irish elk is not even a close cousin of our modern elk so when scientists began to discover Irish elk fossils in the 17th and 18th centuries they were bamboozled some thought the bones were those of a moose while others mistakenly identified them as being from a European reindeer but since researchers in those days didn't comprehend the concepts of extinction or evolution their errors can be considered excusable meanwhile although the Irish elk disappeared from Ireland 10,000 years ago the species continued to exist in Siberia until about 3,000 years later and they were absolutely extraordinary animals to their antlers for example could spread to 12 feet a larger reach than that of any other species of deer known to the modern world plus the Megalosaurus giganteus to give the Irish elk its Latin name can be first traced to around 400,000 years ago to put that in context our species *** sapiens probably originated about three hundred fifteen thousand years ago so even though the Irish elk has been extinct for seven thousand years it still had a longer run on the planet than humans have had to date however most of the elk remains uncovered in Ireland are thought to be between eleven thousand seven hundred fifty and ten thousand nine hundred fifty years old and Ireland certainly has been prolific in discoveries of this particular species at just one location the believe dag bog and County Dublin more than 100 such specimens have been uncovered and what brought about the extinction of the Irish elk is still the subject of scientific debate the huge size of their antlers hunting and changes in vegetation leading to malnourishment have all been proposed as causes a common repeated idea is that the end of the last ice age led to environmental changes that did for these giant deer although a definitive answer as to their fate remains elusive but rather startlingly we may yet see these gigantic deer gracing the bogs and hills of the Emerald Isle again in 2018 the website Mother Nature Network named 14 extinct species that could be candidates for cloning with cutting-edge DNA extraction technology one of the animals on this list none other than the Irish elk but what if the Irish elk skull called from the waters of lockni by r-two fishermen well it seems that McIlroy and Coyle are not entirely certain what to do with their find in fact at the time of riding the relics are sitting in a garage on a pair ponder their future however while speaking to Irish website the journal in September 2018 McIlroy said going by preserving the discovery I don't know what to do with it or anything like that but the next step is for people to see it and he added that interested buyers had been in touch so if you're in the market for a fine set of Irish elk antlers don't delay I hope you liked this video then please hit the subscribe button and click on Bell icon to never miss the video from our Channel