Pronghorn

Sweet!  On my way home from work yesterday, I saw four pronghorn crossing the road.  The females start dropping their fawns at the end of May, and the babies are always ridiculously cute.  They’re definitely one of my favorite animals out at Goblin Valley – every time I see them I’m amazed how they thrive in such a hot, dry place.

(photo credit:  http://www.ca.uky.edu/forestryextension/ThomasBarnes2.php)

Ready for a naturalist geek-out?  So glad you asked …

Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) are really amazing, beautiful animals.  They live on open plains, where they graze on shrubs, forbs, and grasses.  When threatened, they can run up to 65 mph, which makes them the second fastest land animal after the cheetah.   Pronghorn need wide open spaces to thrive – although they’re able to leap across 8-foot barriers, they usually crawl under barbed-wire fences.

Male pronghorn.  (Photo credit:  http://www.flickriver.com/photos/phlog/)

Pronghorn are often confused with antelope.  However, true antelope are only distantly related to pronghorn – they aren’t even in the same family.  True antelope are Old World mammals that belong to the Bovidae family.  Antelope have unbranching horns that are made of keratin, grow on a bony core, and never shed.

Blackbuck antelope.  (Photo credit:  http://vijaycavale.blogspot.com)

True old world antelope. (Photo credit:  http://www.indianwildlife.org/India-Antelopes.html)

Pronghorn, on the other hand, belong to the Antilocapridae family and are only found in North America.  All the other species in this family are extinct, so they don’t have any close relatives.  The pronghorn horn consists of an outer sheath of hairlike substance that grows around a bony core.  This sheath is shed every year.

Hairlike sheath. (Photo credit: https://skullsunlimited.com/record_species.php?id=3779)

  

When Lewis and Clark first explored the western United States in 1805, more than 35 million pronghorn wandered the plains.  By 1900, their numbers had plummeted to only 13,000. New protections and stricter hunting regulations allowed their population to bounce back to about 750,000 animals today.

Gobliny pronghorn