Torontoceros ("horn of Toronto") was an extinct genus of deer, with the sole known fossil nicknamed the Toronto subway deer. It lived in the Late Pleistocene (around 12,000 - 11,000 years ago) in Ontario while likely being native over a larger area.[1] The sole species is T. hypogaeus.
Fossils of Torontoceros were first unearthed in 1977 from Late Pleistocene deposits exposed by excavations brought about by the construction of the Bloor-Danforth subway line in Toronto, Canada, the sediments dating to the Late Pleistocene. It was later described by Canadian paleontologists C. S. Churcher and R. L. Peterson in 1982 as a new genus and species of cervid after the specimen had been donated to the Royal Ontario Museum, where the fossils were housed under specimen number ROMM 75974. The fossils were incomplete, consisting only of a damaged braincase with attached antlers, though they were noted to be very heavily-built for the size of the animal.[1]
The species name hypogaeus comes from the Greek words for below and earth, as it was found several metres underground.
Description
Torontoceros is known from an incomplete skeleton, which is however sufficient to hypothesise its appearance. This animal is believed to have been as large as a current caribou, with its appearance also reminiscent of it. The large antlers, however, appear to have been much larger and heavier than those of the present forms. The surface of the pedicles indicates that the Torontoceros specimen had died in the spring, when the antlers were still covered with velvet and not yet fully developed.[1]
Classification
Torontoceros was a member of the Capreolinae subfamily of deer in the tribe Rangiferini. A 2025 genetic study determined that its closet relative was the genus Odocoileus, which in northern North America includes white-tailed deer and mule deer, rather than the caribou that Torontoceros is thought to have resembled.[2]
Paleoecology
Fossil pollen found on the site indicates that Torontoceros lived in an environment consisting of deciduous forests and coniferous forests at the end of the last ice age.[1] It is likely that this animal lived side-by-side with the first North American humans, the Paleo-Indians. Some footprints found in 1908 during other works, just 300 metres from where Torontoceros was found[citation needed], indicate the presence of the oldest humans in North America; unfortunately the footprints were destroyed.
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