Scientists Record Deer Gnawing On Human Remains For The First … – Huffington post (press release) (blog)

Deer are nothing if not symbols of wide-eyed innocence surely youve heard the term doe-eyed or have seen the film Bambi?

Turns out,weve underestimated deer.

A study published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences this week reveals that deer yes, those pictures of guileless natural beauty have been caught chowing down on human remains.

Herein, we report on the first known photographic evidence of deer gnawing human remains, write scientists from Texas Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in the paper, published Tuesday.

Popular Science reports that researchers left a human body out in the woods in 2014 set up a motion-sensitive camera so that they could study how what scavenging species would do to the corpse.

It wasnt for a few months that the camera caught our antlered suspect a white-tailed deer with a human rib bone in its mouth. A few days later, a deer unclear if it was the same one was spotted again with a rib bone in its mouth like a cigar, according to Popular Science.

Erin Cadigan via Getty Images

Studying the effects of wild animals on corpses can potentially help investigators figure out crucial information about found human bodies, like the length of time a person has been dead.

Were glad they found useful information, but we wish someone had warned us deer were running around with human-bone cigars a little earlier. A Google search for deer attack nets a lot of results. Waymore results than you might think.

And sure, these include situations where a deer has fought back against a hunter or attacked a driver after being struck. But they also include deer whose motives are less clear. For instance, a stag that reportedly attacked a visitor at a national park in Australia, or one that jumped a man who had just freed the animal from a coyote trap.

Listen, deer. Were not all bad. Though honestly, with the destruction that humans have wrought against the natural world, its not that surprising you want to smoke our bones like cigars.

Excerpt from:
Scientists Record Deer Gnawing On Human Remains For The First ... - Huffington post (press release) (blog)